Ludovico Ariosto · 1532 · global

Ariosto's epic of 1516 and 1532, thirty-eight thousand lines of it. Charlemagne is besieged at Paris and his paladins keep riding off after other things - but the journey that holds the poem together is Astolfo's, who flies a hippogriff from an island beyond Cathay to Ethiopia, and then takes a chariot to the Moon to fetch back Orlando's lost wits in a jar.

1. 1
   Paris

   Charlemagne besieged by Agramante's Saracen army, and the poem's frame - a war that keeps being interrupted by knights riding off after women, horses and each other, which is Ariosto's method and his joke.

2. 2
   Alcina's island

   An island beyond Cathay where the sorceress Alcina turns her discarded lovers into trees and rocks - and Astolfo, Duke of England, spends part of the poem as a myrtle bush explaining his situation to passing knights.

3. 3
   Quinsai

   Freed and mounted on the hippogriff, he flies west across Asia - Cathay, Mangiana and the great Quinsai, all real names off the maps Ariosto had, which is why the Furioso can be plotted at all.

4. 4
   India

   Across the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean, where his purgatorial trials turn a comic English prince into something closer to a soldier of God - the transformation the whole flight is arranged to produce.

5. 5
   Jerusalem

   He worships at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the poem's register changes - a chivalric romance quietly becoming a crusading one, which is what the 1532 revisions were for.

6. 6
   Ethiopia

   The court of Senapo, Prester John - blind and tormented by harpies who foul his food every time he sits down to eat - and Astolfo blows the horn and drives them off, which no one else in Christendom has managed.

7. 7
   The source of the Nile

   He chases the harpies to the head of the river and into a cave that is an entrance to Hell, and seals them in - the medieval geography of Africa taken entirely at face value, because in 1516 nobody knew better.

8. 8
   The Earthly Paradise

   The summit of the Mountain of the Moon, where Saint John the Evangelist is waiting with supper - and explains that the only way to recover Orlando's lost wits is to go and get them, because they are not on Earth.

9. 9
   The Moon

   Elijah's flaming chariot to a plain where everything lost on Earth ends up - crowns, bribes, wasted verses, and jars of the wits of the mad, each labelled. Astolfo finds Orlando's, and a good deal of his own, and sniffs those in.

10. 10
    Biserta

    Down again with the jar, and Orlando held down and made to inhale his own reason - and the two of them raise a Nubian army and sack Agramante's capital, which Ariosto describes like the taking of Jerusalem.

11. 11
    Lipadusa

    Lampedusa, and three against three: Orlando, Oliver and Brandimarte against Agramante, Gradasso and Sobrino - the war ending not in a battle but a duel on a rock, which is how the chivalric world would like to think it ends.