This small book was born of a single, enduring question: Where is Paradise? For the great Christian minds of late antiquity and the Middle Ages-among them Isidore of Seville and Thomas Aquinas-Paradise was not merely a lost symbol, but a real place, concealed somewhere upon the earth and guarded by mystery. Their testimony helped kindle in Christopher Columbus the daring conviction that the Earthly Paradise might still be reached, and that his own voyage was bound up with its rediscovery. Did he, in fact, come to the threshold of Eden? The pages that follow pursue this question in the wake of Columbus, tracing the spiritual, theological, and geographical clues that converge in his enterprise. What emerges is an inquiry into one of the most enigmatic moments in the history of the world-an exploration in which cartography, exegesis, and prophecy meet, and in which the discovery of new lands becomes inseparable from the search for humanity's lost origin and ultimate destiny.
