On the dawn of Good Friday in 1300, Dante Alighieri followed the spirit of the ancient Roman poet Virgil into the underworld. So begins “Inferno,” the opening of Alighieri’s narrative epic The Divine Comedy. The sprawling work, completed between 1308 and 1321, contains over 14,200 lines that trace the Florentine poet’s allegorical journey through the Christian afterlife.
The juiciest section of Alighieri’s masterpiece is “Inferno.” After meeting Virgil in the dark woods, Alighieri and his classical counterpart travel throughout hell’s nine concentric circles. These rings form a funnel toward the center of the Earth, where the monstrous, three-headed Satan is entombed in ice.
Each circle is home to the increasingly wicked souls who are perpetually tormented in relation to their sins: the gluttonous wallow in icy filth, the greedy continually push heavy weights, and the wrathful fight and claw one another to reach the surface of the boiling River Styx. Torturing the damned souls are a succession of devils and mythical monsters, including three-headed hounds, arrow-shooting centaurs and hungry harpies.
While the journey is fantastical, Alighieri grounds his epic by weaving in the stories of several figures from his own day and age. These fictionalizations helped the poet set the record straight in the aftermath of his banishment from his native Florence in 1302 after his political faction lost power, explains Alison Cornish, a professor of medieval Italian literature at New York University and the president of the Dante Society of America. Alighieri would spend the rest of his life in exile.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member