ABSTRACT
Columbus's discovery and its significance to the Italian cultural landscape became particularly apparent in Ludovico Ariosto's early sixteenth century epic, Orlando Furioso (1516). Girolamo Fracastoro's treatment of the New World, as both disease and panacea, owes much to the dichotomous geomorphology of the Commedia in which the abyss of hell and the promontory of Purgatory serve as counterparts to each other. Like Fracastoro's poem it has distinct tones of the Aeneid, but it also bears significant resemblances to Dante's Commedia. Just as in Dante's Purgatorio the snake comes every night to the valley of the princes, here the snake is still in the grass. Like many of the New World chroniclers, Gambara does not make the connection between the New Paradise and Eden explicit.
