R. Magritte, Le château des Pyrénées  (1959), Israel Museum, Jerusalem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rene_Magritte_-_The_Castle_of_the_Pyrenees.jpg . Throughout history, humankind has sought to understand the world and explore the Earth to its furthest boundaries. In the medieval Christian imagination, this natural curiosity was intertwined with the desire to visit, or at least identify, the Paradise, imagined as a physical space situated at the edge of the world. Cons

The sarcophagus of Empress Helena (4th c.), Musei Vaticani, Rome, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:011-_Sarcofago_di_Sant%27Elena,_310-320_d.C._-FG.jpg , CC BY-SA 4.0 BY Fabrizio Garrisi. Empress Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine I (306-337), died around 329 after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. According to the historian Eusebius of Caesarea (4th c.), Helena was buried “in the imperial city,” that is, in Rome. However, later Eastern writers transformed this “im

Emperor Theophilos and his court, as depicted in the manuscript Madrid, Gr. Vitr. 26-2, 12th c. (Chronicle of Skylitzes), f. 42v,...