Dante: "not so ugly"

What makes news these days? Apparently, Dante wasn't as ugly as we all thought he was.

He may not have been exactly handsome. But, as the Italian daily La Repubblica put it bluntly yesterday, "he was less ugly than believed".
Italy's greatest poet, Dante Alighieri, has come to us down the centuries as a severe, hawk-nosed intellectual typified by the Raphael portrait now engraved on Italy's two-euro coin. But this may not be entirely accurate.
Raphael painted that portrait almost 200 years after the poet's death in 1321, and a reconstruction of his face by scientists at Bologna University, published for the first time yesterday, suggests a much less formidable-looking man. Giorgio Grupponi, who oversaw the project, said: "We've given Dante back his humanity."

Read the rest of the article in the Guardian.