Italy

Revelation is written against Rome without naming it. Babylon is seated on seven hills, drunk on the blood of the saints, and enriched by a sea-trade whose merchants mourn her fall; first-century readers under Domitian would not have needed the cipher explained. The empire is the antagonist of the most influential apocalypse ever written, and the identification proved durable enough that Reformation polemic could reuse it against the papacy fifteen centuries later.

Rome then became the place where the timetable was managed. Joachim of Fiore, writing in Calabria around 1200, divided history into three status corresponding to Father, Son and Spirit, and calculated that the third was imminent; his scheme escaped his intentions and fed radical Franciscan movements for centuries, as Norman Cohn traced in detail. Dante set an entire architecture of the afterlife in Italian, fixing its geography in the vernacular imagination. Curial authority meanwhile worked to contain date-setting rather than encourage it, since a fixed end is difficult to govern around.

The double position is what makes Italy structurally interesting. The same city is the beast in the text and the institution that later interpreted the text, which required reading an anti-imperial vision from inside the successor of that empire. The vision itself is treated in Book of Revelation, the doctrinal system in Christian Eschatology, the adversary in The Antichrist, and its most consequential images in Dürer's Apocalypse (The Four Horsemen). The Western end of the world was argued in Latin, and for a long time it was adjudicated in Rome.