A MEMORABLE MEAL.(re-creation of Marsilio Ficino's November 7, 1468, Neoplatonist dinner celebrating Plato's birth and death)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 09-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The re-creation the other night of Marsilio Ficino's Neoplatonist dinner did not go exactly the way the original dinner did, on November 7, 1468, when Ficino, the philosopher, sat down with eight fellow-Neoplatonists, at the Medici Villa at Careggi, in Tuscany, to celebrate the anniversary of Plato's birth and death. For one thing, Ficino was a red-wine man, but the Pierpont Morgan Library, where the re-created banquet was held, didn't like the idea of people spilling red wine on the precious manuscripts, so the Italian Cultural Foundation of...

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