Sexten

Description

Sestos appears in the twenty-eighth canto of Purgatorio, at verse 74, in the expression "intra Sesto e Abido," with which Dante indicates the two extreme points of the strait of the Hellespont: Sestos, on the European (Thracian) coast, and Abydos, on the opposite (Asiatic) coast, separated by the waters of the Sea of Marmara. The mention serves as a real and concrete measure to make perceptible the violence of the impetuous wind that lashes the little valley of purgatory, where Dante imagines a fictitious storm stronger than the one that in reality was unleashed between the two cities during the war between Xerxes and the Greeks. The image, rooted in the classical memory of the storm that caught Xerxes' Persian fleet, thus translates a historical event in an allegorical and moral key.