The Asiatic Society, Mumbai

This guide to the Asiatic Society in Mumbai centers on a letter that arrived in the 1930s from Benito Mussolini, who offered a million pounds for a manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy that had sat in the library since the 1820s, a gift from the Scottish administrator Mountstuart Elphinstone. It traces the neoclassical building itself, opened in 1833 and partly funded by a lottery when official money ran out, and the manuscript's claim to being one of the world's two oldest surviving copies of Dante's poem. Look at the worn wooden floors and wrought-iron terraces of this hall, built when the Society had to fight to stay alive.