Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861–1868); here Dante is lost in Canto 1 of the Inferno

Inferno (Italian for "Hell") is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth. Allegorically, the Divine Comedy represents the journey of the soul towards God, with the Inferno describing the recognition and rejection of sin.^[1]

Overview and vestibule of Hell[link]

The poem begins on the day before Good Friday in the year 1300. The narrator, Dante himself, is thirty-five years old, and thus "halfway along our life's path" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita)—half of the Biblical life expectancy of seventy (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate). The poet finds himself lost in a dark wood in front of a mountain, assailed by three beasts (a lion, a lonza [rendered as "leopard" or "leopon"],^[2] and a she-wolf) he cannot evade, and unable to find the "straight way" (diritta via)—also translatable as "right way"—to salvation. Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "deep place" (basso loco) where the sun is silent (l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by the Roman poet Virgil, who claims to have been sent by Beatrice, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk forward with their heads on backward, unable to see what is ahead, because they tried, through forbidden means, to look ahead to the future in life. Such a contrapasso "functions not merely as a form of divine revenge, but rather as the fulfilment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul during his or her life."^[3]

The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix

Dante passes through the gate of Hell, which bears an inscription, the ninth (and final) line of which is the famous phrase "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", or "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"^[4]

Before entering Hell completely, Dante and his guide see the Uncommitted, souls of people who in life did nothing, neither for good nor evil (among these Dante recognizes either Pope Celestine V or Pontius Pilate; the text is ambiguous). Mixed with them are outcasts who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels. These souls are neither in Hell nor out of it, but reside on the shores of the Acheron, their punishment to eternally pursue a banner (i.e. self interest) while pursued by wasps and hornets that continually sting them while maggots and other such insects drink their blood and tears. This symbolizes the sting of their conscience and the repugnance of sin. This can also be seen as a reflection of the spiritual stagnation they lived in. As with the Purgatorio and Paradiso, the Inferno has a structure of 9+1=10, with this "vestibule" different in nature from the nine circles of Hell, and separated from them by the Acheron.

After passing through the "vestibule," Dante and Virgil reach the ferry that will take them across the river Acheron and to Hell proper. The ferry is piloted by Charon, who does not want to let Dante enter, for he is a living being. Virgil forces Charon to take him by means of another famous line Vuolsi così colà dove si puote, which translates to "So it is wanted there where the power lies," referring to the fact that Dante is on his journey on divine grounds. The wailing and blasphemy of the damned souls entering Charon's boat are a contrast to the joyful singing of the blessed souls arriving by ferry in the Purgatorio. However, the actual passage across the Acheron is undescribed since Dante faints and does not wake up until he is on the other side.

Virgil then guides Dante through the nine circles of Hell. The circles are concentric, representing a gradual increase in wickedness, and culminating at the centre of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. Each circle's sinners are punished in a fashion fitting their crimes: each sinner is afflicted for all of eternity by the chief sin he committed. People who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before their deaths are found not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they labour to be free of their sins. Those in Hell are people who tried to justify their sins and are unrepentant.

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious.^[5] These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell (the first 5 Circles) for the self-indulgent sins; Circles 6 and 7 for the violent sins; and Circles 8 and 9 for the malicious sins.

The nine circles of Hell[link]

The Harrowing of Hell, in a 14th c. illuminated manuscript, the Petites Heures de Jean de Berry

First Circle (Limbo)[link]

In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows; thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. Without baptism ("the portal of the faith that you embrace"^[6]) they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo includes green fields and a castle with seven gates to represent the seven virtues, the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Persian polymath Avicenna. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the mathematician Euclid, the scientist Pedanius Dioscorides, the statesman Cicero, the first doctor Hippocrates, the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Averroes and many others, including Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general ("in his armor, falcon-eyed"^[7]), Hector, Electra, Camilla, Latinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucretia, and Orpheus. Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo (Canto IV). Dante implies that all virtuous non-Christians find themselves here, although he later encounters two (Cato of Utica and Statius) in Purgatory and two (Trajan and Ripheus) in Heaven.

Beyond the first circle, all of those condemned for active, deliberately willed sin are judged by the serpentine Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles by wrapping his tail around himself a corresponding number of times (Minos initially hinders the poets' passage, until rebuked by Virgil). The lower circles are structured according to the classical (Aristotelian) conception of virtue and vice, so that they are grouped into the sins of wantonness, violence, and fraud (which for many commentators are represented by the leopard, lion, and she-wolf^[8]). The sins of wantonness—weakness in controlling one's desires and natural urges—are the mildest among them, and, correspondingly, appear first, while the sins of violence and fraud appear lower down.

Second Circle (Lust)[link]

Gianciotto Discovers Paolo and Francesca by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

In the second circle of Hell are those overcome by lust. Dante condemns these "carnal malefactors"^[9] for letting their appetites sway their reason. They are the first ones to be truly punished in Hell. These souls are blown to and fro by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without hope of rest. This symbolizes the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly.

In this circle, Dante sees Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris, Tristan, and many others who were overcome by sensual love during their life. Dante is told by Francesca da Rimini how she and her husband's brother Paolo Malatesta committed adultery, but then died a violent death, in the name of Love, at the hands of her husband, Giovanni (Gianciotto). Francesca reports that their act of adultery was triggered by reading the adulterous story of Lancelot and Guinevere (an episode sculpted by Auguste Rodin in The Kiss). Nevertheless, she predicts that her husband will be punished for his fratricide in Caina, within the ninth circle (Canto V).

The English poet John Keats, in his sonnet "On a Dream," imagines what Dante does not give us, the point of view of Paolo:

"... But to that second circle of sad hell,
Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm."^[10]

Third Circle (Gluttony)[link]

The third circle, illustrated by Stradanus.

Cerberusas illustrated by Gustave Doré.

The "Great Worm" Cerberus guards the gluttons, forced to lie in a vile slush produced by ceaseless foul, icy rain (Virgil obtains safe passage past the monster by filling its three mouths with mud). In her notes on this circle, Dorothy L. Sayers writes that "the surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence."^[11] The gluttons lie here sightless and heedless of their neighbors, symbolizing the cold, selfish, and empty sensuality of their lives.^[11] Just as lust has revealed its true nature in the winds of the previous circle, here the slush reveals the true nature of sensuality – which includes not only overindulgence in food and drink, but also other kinds of addiction.^[12]

In this circle, Dante converses with a Florentine contemporary identified as Ciacco, which means "hog."^[13] A character with the same nickname later appears in The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio.^[14] Ciacco speaks to Dante regarding strife in Florence between the "White" and "Black" Guelphs. In one of a number of prophecies in the poem, Ciacco "predicts" the expulsion of the White party, to which Dante belonged, and which led to Dante's own exile. This event occurred in 1302, after the date in which the poem is set, but before the poem was written^[13] (Canto VI).

Fourth Circle (Greed)[link]

In Gustave Doré's illustrations for the fourth circle, the weights are huge money bags.

Those whose attitude toward material goods deviated from the appropriate mean are punished in the fourth circle. They include the avaricious or miserly (including many "clergymen, and popes and cardinals"^[15]), who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. The two groups are guarded by a figure Dante names as Pluto, either Pluto the classical ruler of the underworld or Plutus the Greek god of wealth^[16] (who uses the cryptic phrase Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe), but Virgil protects Dante from him. The two groups joust, using as weapons great weights which they push with their chests:

"… I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?' "^[17]

The contrast between these two groups leads Virgil to discourse on the nature of Fortune, who raises nations to greatness, and later plunges them into poverty, as she shifts "those empty goods from nation unto nation, clan to clan."^[18] This speech fills what would otherwise be a gap in the poem, since both groups are so absorbed in their activity that Virgil tells Dante that it would be pointless to try to speak to them – indeed, they have lost their individuality, and been rendered "unrecognizable"^[19] (Canto VII).

Fifth Circle (Anger)[link]

The fifth circle, illustrated by Stradanus.

Lower Hell, inside the walls of Dis, in an illustration by Stradanus. There is a drop from the sixth circle to the three rings of the seventh circle, then again to the ten rings of the eighth circle, and, at the bottom, to the icy ninth circle.

In the swamp-like water of the river Styx, the wrathful fight each other on the surface, and the sullen lie gurgling beneath the water, withdrawn "into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe."^[20] Phlegyas reluctantly transports Dante and Virgil across the Styx in his skiff. On the way they are accosted by Filippo Argenti, a Black Guelph from a prominent family. When Dante was forced to leave Florence, Argenti took all his property. When Dante responds "In weeping and in grieving, accursed spirit, may you long remain,"^[21] Virgil blesses him. Literally, this reflects the fact that souls in Hell are eternally fixed in the state they have chosen, but allegorically, it reflects Dante's beginning awareness of his own sin^[22] (Cantos VII and VIII).

The lower parts of Hell are contained within the walls of the city of Dis, which is itself surrounded by the Stygian marsh. Punished within Dis are active (rather than passive) sins. The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels. Virgil is unable to convince them to let Dante and him enter, and the Furies (consisting of Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone) and Medusa threaten Dante. An angel sent from Heaven secures entry for the poets, opening the gate by touching it with a wand, and rebuking those who opposed Dante. Allegorically, this reveals the fact that the poem is beginning to deal with sins that philosophy and humanism cannot fully understand. Virgil also mentioned to Dante on how Erichtho sent him down to the lowest circle of Hell to bring back a spirit from there.^[22] (Cantos VIII and IX).

Sixth Circle (Heresy)[link]

In the sixth circle, Heretics, such as Epicureans (who say "the soul dies with the body"^[23]) are trapped in flaming tombs. Dante holds discourse with a pair of Epicurian Florentines in one of the tombs: Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline (posthumously condemned for heresy in 1283); and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph, who was the father of Dante's friend and fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti. The political affiliation of these two men allows for a further discussion of Florentine politics (Canto X). Also seen here are Epicurus, Emperor Frederick II, and Pope Anastasius II.

In response to a question from Dante about the "prophecy" he has received, Farinata explains that what the souls in Hell know of life on earth comes from seeing the future, not from any observation of the present. Consequently, when "the portal of the future has been shut,"^[24] it will no longer be possible for them to know anything.

Pausing for a moment before the steep descent to the foul-smelling seventh circle, Virgil explains the geography and rationale of Lower Hell, in which violent and malicious sins are punished. In this explanation, he refers to the Nicomachean Ethics and the Physics of Aristotle (Canto XI). In particular, he asserts that there are only two legitimate sources of wealth: natural resources ("nature") and human activity ("art"). Usury, to be punished in the next circle, is therefore an offence against both:^[25]

"From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,
if you recall how Genesis begins,
for men to make their way, to gain their living;
and since the usurer prefers another
pathway, he scorns both nature in herself
and art her follower; his hope is elsewhere."^[26]

Seventh Circle (Violence)[link]

The seventh circle houses the violent. Its entry is guarded by the Minotaur, and it is divided into three rings:

• Outer ring: This ring houses the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire, to a level commensurate with their sins: Alexander the Great is immersed up to his eyebrows, although Dante praises Alexander at other points in the poem, meaning he might be referring to a different Alexander. Dionysius I of Syracuse, Azzolino da Romano, Guy de Montfort, Obizzo d'Este, Ezzelino III da Romano, Rinier da Corneto, and Rinier Pazzo are also seen in the Phlegethon as well as references to Atilla the Hun. The Centaurs, commanded by Chiron and Pholus, patrol the ring, shooting arrows into any sinners who emerge higher out of the river than each is allowed. The centaur Nessus guides the poets along Phlegethon and across a ford in the widest, shallowest stretch of the river (Canto XII). This passage may have been influenced by the early medieval Visio Karoli Grossi.^[27]

The Gianfigliazzi family was identified by a heraldic device of a lion (blue on yellow background).

• Middle ring: In this ring are the suicides (the violent against self), who are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees and then fed upon by Harpies. Dante breaks a twig off one of the bushes and from the broken, bleeding, branch hears the tale of Pietro della Vigne, who committed suicide after falling out of favour with Emperor Frederick II (his presence here, rather than in the ninth circle, indicates that Dante believes that the accusations made against him were false^[28]). Also here are Lano da Siena and Jacopo da Sant' Andrea. The trees are a metaphor for the state of mind in which suicide is committed.^[29] Dante learns that these suicides, unique among the dead, will not be corporally resurrected after the final judgement since they gave away their bodies through suicide. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the thorny limbs. The other residents of this ring are the profligates, who destroyed their lives by destroying the means by which life is sustained (i.e. money and property). They are perpetually chased and mauled by ferocious dogs; the destruction wrought upon the wood by the profligates' flight and punishment as they crash through the undergrowth causes further suffering to the suicides, who cannot move out of the way (Canto XIII).

• Inner ring: Here the violent against God (blasphemers) and the violent against nature (sodomites and, as explained in the sixth circle, usurers) all reside in a desert of flaming sand with fiery flakes raining from the sky (a similar fate to Sodom and Gomorrah). The blasphemers lie on the sand, the usurers sit, and the sodomites wander about in groups. Dante sees the classical warrior Capaneus there, who for blasphemy against Zeus was struck down with a thunderbolt during the Siege of Thebes. Dante converses with two Florentine sodomites from different groups. One of them is Dante's mentor, Brunetto Latini. Dante is very surprised and touched by this encounter and shows Brunetto great respect for what he has taught him ("you taught me how man makes himself eternal; / and while I live, my gratitude for that / must always be apparent in my words"^[30]), thus refuting suggestions that Dante only placed his enemies in Hell.^[31] The other sodomite is Iacopo Rusticucci, a politician, who blames his wife for his fate. Those punished here for usury include the Florentines Catello di Rosso Gianfigliazzi, Guido Guerra, Iacopo Rusticucci, Ciappo Ubriachi, and Giovanni di Buiamonte; and the Paduans Reginaldo degli Scrovegni and Vitaliano di Iacopo Vitaliani. They are identified not primarily by name, but by heraldic devices emblazoned on the purses around their necks – purses which "their eyes seemed to feast upon"^[32] (Cantos XIV through XVII).

[edit] Eighth Circle (Fraud)

The last two circles of Hell punish sins that involve conscious fraud or treachery. These circles can be reached only by descending a vast cliff, which Dante and Virgil do on the back of Geryon, a winged monster traditionally represented as having three heads or three conjoined bodies,^[33] but described by Dante as having three mixed natures: human, bestial, and reptilian.^[33] Geryon is an image of fraud, having the face of an honest man on the body of a beautifully colored wyvern, with the furry paws of a lion and a poisonous sting in the pointy snake-like tail^[34] (Canto XVII).

Jason and Medea, by John William Waterhouse (1907).

Dante's guide rebuffs Malacoda and his fiends between Bolgie 5 and 6, Canto 21.

Dante climbs the flinty steps in Bolgia 7, Canto 26.

The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten Bolgie, or ditches of stone, with bridges spanning the ditches:

• Bolgia 1: Panderers and seducers march in separate lines in opposite directions, whipped by demons (Dante makes reference here to a recent traffic rule developed for the Jubilee year of 1300 in Rome: keep to the right^[35]). Just as the panderers and seducers used the passions of others to drive them to do their bidding, they are themselves driven by demons to march for all eternity.^[35] In the group of panderers, the poets notice Venedico Caccianemico, who sold his own sister to the Marchese d'Este. In the group of seducers, Virgil points out Jason who gained the help of Medea by seducing and marrying her only to later desert her for Creusa.^[35] Jason also seduced Hypsipyle, but "abandoned her, alone and pregnant"^[36] (Canto XVIII).

• Bolgia 2: Flatterers also exploited other people, this time using language. They are steeped in human excrement, which represents the words they produced. Alessio Interminei of Lucca and Thaïs are seen here.^[35] (Canto XVIII).

• Bolgia 3: Dante now forcefully expresses^[37] his condemnation of those who committed simony. Those who committed simony are placed head-first in holes in the rock (resembling baptismal fonts), with flames burning on the soles of their feet. One of the simoniacs, Pope Nicholas III, denounces two of his successors, Pope Boniface VIII and Pope Clement V, for the same offence. Simon Magus, who offered gold in exchange for holy power to Saint Peter, is also seen here. The simile of baptismal fonts gives Dante an incidental opportunity to clear his name of an accusation of malicious damage to the font in the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini^[38] (Canto XIX).

• Bolgia 4: Sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets here have their heads twisted around on their bodies backward, so that they "found it necessary to walk backward, / because they could not see ahead of them."^[39] While referring primarily to attempts to see into the future by forbidden means, this also symbolises the twisted nature of magic in general.^[40] In this Bolgia, Dante sees Amphiaraus, Tiresias (whose double transformation was also referenced), Tiresias' daughter Manto, Aruns, Michael Scot, Alberto de Casalodi, and Guido Bonatti, among others (Canto XX).

• Bolgia 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, which represents the sticky fingers and dark secrets of their corrupt deals.^[41] The barrators are the political analogue of the simoniacs, and Dante devotes several cantos to them. They are guarded by devils called the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"), who provide some savage and satirical black comedy--in the last line of Canto XXI, the sign for their march is provided by a fart: "and he had made a trumpet of his ass."^[42] The leader of the Malebranche, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante safely to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment one of the sinners (identified by early commentators as Ciampolo), who names some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch. The promise of safe conduct the poets have received from the demons turns out to have limited value (and there is no "next bridge"^[43]), so that the poets are forced to scramble down into the sixth Bolgia (Cantos XXI through XXIII).

• Bolgia 6: In the sixth Bolgia, the poets find the hypocrites listlessly walking along wearing gilded lead cloaks, which represent the falsity behind the surface appearance of their actions – falsity that weighs them down and makes spiritual progress impossible for them.^[43] Dante speaks with Catalano and Loderingo, two members of the Jovial Friars, an order which had acquired a reputation for not living up to its vows,^[43] and which was eventually suppressed by Pope Sixtus V. Caiaphas, the high priest responsible for ordering Jesus crucified, is also seen here, crucified to the ground and trampled (Canto XXIII).

• Bolgia 7: Two cantos are devoted to the thieves, who are guarded by the centaur Cacus who has a fire-breathing dragon on his shoulders and snakes covering his equine back (in Roman mythology, Cacus was not a centaur but a monstrous fire-breathing giant slain by Heracles). The thieves are pursued and bitten by snakes and lizards. The full horror of the thieves' punishment is revealed gradually: just as they stole other people's substance in life, their very identity becomes subject to theft here,^[44] and the snake bites make them undergo various transformations. Vanni Fucci is turned to ashes and resurrected. Agnello is blended with the six-legged reptile that is Cianfa. Buoso exchanges shapes with the four-legged Francesco: "The soul that had become an animal, / now hissing, hurried off along the valley; / the other one, behind him, speaks and spits."^[45] (Cantos XXIV and XXV).

• Bolgia 8: Two further cantos are devoted to the fraudulent advisers or evil counsellors, who are concealed within individual flames. These are not people who gave false advice, but people who used their position to advise others to engage in fraud.^[46] Ulysses and Diomedes are condemned here for the deception of the Trojan Horse. Ulysses also tells the tale of his fatal final voyage (an invention of Dante's) where he left his home and family to sail to the end of the Earth only to have his ship founder near Mount Purgatory. Ulysses also mentions of his encounter with Circe stating that she "beguiled him." Guido da Montefeltro recounts how he advised Pope Boniface VIII to capture the fortress of Palestrina, by offering the Colonna family inside it a false amnesty, and then razing it to the ground after they surrendered. Guido became a Franciscan in 1296, and died two years later. Guido describes St. Francis as coming to take his soul to Heaven, only to have a demon assert prior claim. Although Boniface had absolved Guido in advance for his evil advice, Dante points out the invalidity of that, since absolution requires contrition, and a man cannot be contrite for a sin at the same time that he is intending to commit it^[47] (Cantos XXVI and XXVII).

• Bolgia 9: In the ninth Bolgia, a sword-wielding demon hacks at the Sowers of Discord, dividing parts of their bodies as in life they divided others.^[48] As they make their rounds the wounds heal, only to have the demon tear apart their bodies again. Dante encounters Muhammad, who tells him to warn the schismatic and heretic Fra Dolcino. Dante describes Muhammad as a schismatic,^[48][49] apparently viewing Islam as an off-shoot from Christianity, and similarly Dante seems to condemn Ali for schism between Sunni and Shiite (for more on Dante's relationship to Islam, see the relevant section of the main article). In this Bolgia, Dante also encounters Bertran de Born, who carries around his severed head like a lantern (a literal representation allowing himself to detach his intelligence from himself), as a punishment for (Dante believes) fomenting the rebellion of Henry the Young King against his father Henry II (Cantos XXVIII and XXIX).

• Bolgia 10: In the final Bolgia, various sorts of falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and imposters), who are a "disease" on society, are themselves afflicted with different types of diseases.^[50] Potiphar's wife is briefly mentioned here for her false accusation of Joseph. The Achaean spy Sinon is here for tricking the Trojans into taking the Trojan Horse into their city (Sinon is here rather than in Bolgia 8 because his advice was false as well as evil) and suffers from a burning fever. Gianni Schicchi is a 'rabid goblin' for forging the will of Dante's relative Buoso Donati. Myrrha is here for disguising herself to commit incest with her father King Theias and suffers from madness. In the notes on her translation, Sayers remarks that the descent through Malebolge "began with the sale of the sexual relationship, and went on to the sale of Church and State; now, the very money is itself corrupted, every affirmation has become perjury, and every identity a lie";^[50] so that every aspect of social interaction has been progressively destroyed (Cantos XXIX and XXX).

Ninth Circle (Treachery)[link]

Titans and giants, including Ephialtes on the left, in Gustave Doré's illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy.

Dante speaks to the traitors in the ice, Canto 32.

The ninth and last circle is ringed by classical and Biblical giants, who perhaps symbolize pride and other spiritual flaws lying behind acts of treachery.^[51] The giants are standing on a ledge above the ninth circle of Hell,^[52] so that from the Malebolge they are visible from the waist up. They include Nimrod, as well as Ephialtes (who with his brother Otus tried to storm Olympus during the Gigantomachy), Briareus, Tityos, and Typhon. The giant Antaeus (being the only giant unbound with chains) lowers Dante and Virgil into the pit that forms the ninth circle of Hell (Canto XXXI).

The traitors are distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying a special relationship of some kind. There are four concentric zones (or "rounds") of traitors, corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal of liege lords. In contrast to the popular image of Hell as fiery, the traitors are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus, with each group encased in ice to progressively greater depths.

• Round 1 is named Caïna, after Cain, who killed his brother. Traitors to kindred are here immersed in the ice up to their faces – "the place / where shame can show itself"^[53] Mordred, who attacked his uncle/father King Arthur, is one of the traitors here: "him who, at one blow, had chest and shadow / shattered by Arthur's hand"^[54] (Canto XXXII).

• Round 2 is named Antenora, after Antenor of Troy, who according to medieval tradition, betrayed his city to the Greeks. Traitors to political entities, such as parties, cities, or countries, are located here. Count Ugolino pauses from gnawing on the head of his former partner-in-crime Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini to describe how Ruggieri turned against him after an accidental death of Ruggieri's illegitimate son during a riot and had him imprisoned along with his sons and grandsons, condemning them to death by starvation. A number of correspondences, such as allusions to the same passage of the Aeneid, link this passage to the story of Paolo and Francesca in the second circle,^[55] indicating that this icy hell of betrayal is the final result of consent to sin^[55] (Cantos XXXII and XXXIII).

• Round 3 is named Ptolomaea, probably after Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who invited Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to a banquet and then killed them.^[55] Traitors to their guests are punished here, lying supine in the ice, which covers them, except for their faces. They are punished more severely than the previous traitors, since the relationship to guests is an entirely voluntary one.^[56] Fra Alberigo, who had armed soldiers kill his brother at a banquet, explains that sometimes a soul falls here before Atropos cuts the thread of life. Their bodies on Earth are immediately possessed by a demon, so what seems to be a walking man has reached the stage of being incapable of repentance (Canto XXXIII).

• Round 4 is named Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, Biblical betrayer of Christ. Here are the traitors to their lords and benefactors. All of the sinners punished within are completely encapsulated in ice, distorted in all conceivable positions. With no one to talk to here, Dante and Virgil quickly move on to the centre of Hell (Canto XXXIV).

Satan is trapped in the frozen central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Canto 34.

In the very centre of Hell, condemned for committing the ultimate sin (personal treachery against God), is Satan. Satan is described as a giant, terrifying beast with three faces, one red, one black, and one a pale yellow:

he had three faces: one in front bloodred;
and then another two that, just above
the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first;
and at the crown, all three were reattached;
the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white;
the left in its appearance was like those
who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.^[57]

Satan is waist deep in ice, weeping tears from his six eyes, and beating his six wings as if trying to escape, although the icy wind that emanates only further ensures his imprisonment (as well as that of the others in the ring). Each face has a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor, with Brutus and Cassius feet-first in the left and right mouths respectively. These men were involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar—an act which, to Dante, represented the destruction of a unified Italy and the killing of the man who was divinely appointed to govern the world.^[58] In the central, most vicious mouth is Judas Iscariot—the namesake of Judecca and the betrayer of Jesus. Judas is being administered the most horrifying torture of the three traitors, his head gnawed by Satan's mouth, and his back being forever skinned by Satan's claws. What is seen here is a inverted trinity: Satan is impotent, ignorant, and full of hate, in contrast to the all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving nature of God.^[58]

The two poets escape Hell by climbing down Satan's ragged fur, passing through the centre of the earth (with a consequent change in the direction of gravity, causing Dante to at first think they are returning to Hell), and they emerge in the other hemisphere (described in the Purgatorio) just before dawn on Easter Sunday, beneath a sky studded with stars (Canto XXXIV).

See also[link]

• Allegory in the Middle Ages
• Dante and his Divine Comedy in popular culture
• Dante's Satan
• Divine Comedy
• List of cultural references in The Divine Comedy
• Paradiso
• Purgatorio

Footnotes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dante's Inferno

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Divine Comedy/Inferno

Texts[link]

• Dante's Divine Comedy presented by the Electronic Literature Foundation. Multiple editions, with Italian and English facing page and interpolated versions.
• Dante Dartmouth Project: Full text of more than 70 Italian, Latin, and English commentaries on the Commedia, ranging in date from 1322 (Iacopo Alighieri) to the 2000s (Robert Hollander)
• World of Dante Multimedia website that offers Italian text of Divine Comedy, Allen Mandelbaum's translation, gallery, interactive maps, timeline, musical recordings, and searchable database for students and teachers by Deborah Parker and IATH (Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities) of the University of Virginia
• Audiobooks: Public domain recordings from LibriVox (in Italian, Longfellow translation); some additional recordings

Secondary materials[link]

• On-line Concordance to the Divine Comedy
• Wikisummaries summary and analysis of "Inferno"
• Danteworlds, multimedia presentation of the Divine Comedy for students by Guy Raffa of the University of Texas
• Dante's Places: a map (still a prototype) of the places named by Dante in the Commedia, created with GoogleMaps. Explanatory PDF is available for download
• Dante's Inferno on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)

v t e Dante Alighieri Works in Latin De vulgari eloquentia  · De Monarchia  · Eclogues Works in Italian La Vita Nuova  · Le Rime  · Convivio Divine Comedy Inferno  · Purgatorio  · Paradiso "Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe"  · "Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi" Characters and places of Divine Comedy Alichino  · Barbariccia  · Ciampolo  · Cocytus  · Corso Donati  · Dis  · Eunoe  · Forese Donati  · Malacoda  · Malebranche  · Malebolge  · Piccarda  · Satan  · Scarmiglione Books, articles, concepts Contrapasso  · Cultural references in Divina Commedia  · Dante Encyclopedia  · Enciclopedia Dantesca People in Dante's life Jacopo Alighieri  · Guido Cavalcanti  · Brunetto Latini  · Beatrice Portinari In popular culture Dante and his Divine Comedy in popular culture  · Après une Lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata  · Dante crater  · Dante Park  · The Divine Comedy (symphony)  · Dante's Inferno (1924 film)  · Dante's Inferno (1935 film)  · Dante's Inferno (2007 film)  · Dante's Inferno (video game)  · Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic  · Dante Symphony  · Demon Lord Dante  · L'Inferno (1911 film)  · Italian battleship Dante Alighieri Book:Dante Alighieri Category:The Divine Comedy Portal:Literature

Look up inferno or Inferno in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Inferno means "Hell" in both Italian and Portuguese, so this word may refer to:

• Hell
• Conflagration, a large uncontrolled fire.

Literature[link]

• Inferno (Dante), the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy
• Inferno (novel), a 1976 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• Inferno (Star Wars novel), a 2007 novel by Troy Denning
• Inferno (Strindberg), an 1897 novel by August Strindberg
• Isaac Asimov's Inferno, a 1994 novel by Roger MacBride Allen
• Inferno, a novel in the Bionicle Legends series
• Inferno, a concept of infernality of Nature in The Bull's Hour
• Dante Alighieri's Inferno Metaphor, a 2010 book by Anthony Cristiano

Music[link]

• Infernö, a Norwegian thrash metal-band
• Inferno Metal Festival, annual music festival in Oslo, Norway
• Zbigniew Robert Promiński or Inferno, drummer with the band Behemoth
• Inferno, guitarist with Cirith Gorgor

Albums[link]

• Inferno (Motörhead album)
• Inferno (Entombed album)
• Inferno (soundtrack), a soundtrack album by Keith Emerson, from the 1980 film (see below)
• Inferno - Last in Live, an album by Dio
• Inferno (Tangerine Dream album), an album by Tangerine Dream
• Inferno, an album by Alien Sex Fiend
• Inferno, an album by Project Pitchfork

Songs[link]

• "Inferno", a song by Kreator from Voices of Transgression – A 90s Retrospective
• "Inferno (Unleash the Fire)", a song by Symphony X from The Odyssey

Film[link]

• L'Inferno (film) a 1911 Italian film
• Inferno (1953 film), a film noir by Roy Ward Baker
• Inferno (1980 film), an Italian horror film by Dario Argento
• Inferno (1997 film), a film starring Don "The Dragon" Wilson
• Inferno (1999 film), starring Jean-Claude Van Damme
• Inferno (2001 film), a British "short" movie directed by Paul Kousoulides

Television[link]

• "Inferno", fourth episode of the 1965 Doctor Who serial The Romans
• "Inferno" (Doctor Who), a 1970 serial from the British science fiction series
• "Inferno" (Stargate Atlantis), an episode in the science fiction series
• Inferno (Transformers), four characters from the various Transformers universes
• "Inferno" (Captain Scarlet), an episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
• Series titles of reality game shows on MTV:
  • Real World/Road Rules Challenge: The Inferno (2004)
  • Real World/Road Rules Challenge: The Inferno II (2005)
  • Real World/Road Rules Challenge: The Inferno III (2007)
• Inferno, a female gladiator in Gladiators
• Team Inferno, Disney Channel Games Red Team

Comics[link]

• Inferno (DC Comics), a character in Legion of Super-Heroes
• Inferno (Exemplar), a character in the Marvel Comics team Exemplars
• Inferno (Marvel Comics), a crossover involving the X-Men
• Inferno (demon), a Marvel Comics supervillain
• Inferno (Joseph Conroy), a minor Marvel Comics supervillain
• Inferno!, a Warhammer anthology magazine mixing text and comic stories
• Inferno, a title from Caliber Comics
• Armageddon: Inferno, a DC Comics storyline connected with Armageddon 2001
• Judge Dredd: "Inferno", a story line featuring Judge Grice
• Inferno, an alternate version of Legion of Super-Heroes member Sun Boy

Gaming[link]

• Inferno (Soulcalibur), a boss character in Soulcalibur
• Inferno (video game), a 1994 space flight simulation game by Digital Image Design
• Inferno, an installment of the video game Doom
• Alone in the Dark: Inferno, an updated version of the video game Alone in the Dark
• Dante's Inferno (video game), a video game based on the Inferno section of the Divine Comedy

Other uses[link]

• Inferno (G.I. Joe), a fictional character in the G.I. Joe universe
• Inferno (horse), a Canadian Thoroughbred racehorse
• Inferno (operating system)
• Inferno (software), an online visual effects system
• The Inferno (MLS supporters association)

See also[link]

• Dante's Inferno (disambiguation)
• Infernal (disambiguation)
• Infernus
• Towering Inferno (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello palace in Florence. This oldest picture of Dante was painted just prior to his exile and has since been heavily restored.
Born	Mid-May to mid-June c1265 Florence
Died	September 14, 1321(1321-09-14) (aged about 56) Ravenna
Occupation	Statesman, poet, language theorist
Nationality	Italian
Literary movement	Dolce Stil Novo
Influences Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Boethius, Avicenna, Averroes, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Richard of St. Victor, Boethius of Dacia
Influenced almost all Western literature, Samuel Beckett, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jorge Luis Borges, William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Anthony Burgess, T. S. Eliot, John Milton

Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante (UK  /ˈdænti/, US /ˈdɑːnteɪ/; Italian: [ˈdante]; c1265–1321), was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem Commedia, later named La divina commedia (Divine Comedy), considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.^[1]

In Italy he is known as il Sommo Poeta ("the Supreme Poet") or just il Poeta. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns". Dante is also called the "Father of the Italian language".^[2]

Life[link]

Dante was born in Florence, Italy. The exact date of Dante's birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia, "the Inferno" (Halfway through the journey we are living, implying that Dante was around 35 years old, as the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years; and as the imaginary travel took place in 1300, Dante must have been born around 1265). Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini: "As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious" (XXII 151-154). In 1265 the Sun was in Gemini approximately during the period of May 11 to June 11.^[3]

Portrait of Dante, from a fresco in the Palazzo dei Giudici, Florence.

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he could mention by name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), of no earlier than about 1100. Dante's father, Alaghiero^[4] or Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti in the middle of the 13th century. This suggests that Alighiero or his family enjoyed some protective prestige and status, although some suggest that the politically inactive Alighiero was of such low standing that he was not considered worth exiling.

Dante's family had loyalties to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy and which was involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The poet's mother was Bella, likely a member of the Abati family.^[4] She died when Dante was not yet ten years old, and Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. It is uncertain whether he really married her, as widowers had social limitations in these matters, but this woman definitely bore two children, Dante's half-brother Francesco and half-sister Tana (Gaetana). When Dante was 12, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Manetto Donati, member of the powerful Donati family.^[4] Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. Dante had by this time fallen in love with another, Beatrice Portinari (known also as Bice), whom he first met when he was nine years old. Years after his marriage to Gemma, he claims to have met Beatrice again; although he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice, he never mentioned his wife Gemma in any of his poems. The exact date of his marriage is not known: the only certain information is that, before his exile in 1301, Dante already had three children (Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia).^[4]

Dante fought with the Guelph cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289). This victory brought about a reformation of the Florentine constitution. To take any part in public life, one had to be enrolled in one of the city's many commercial or artisan guilds, so Dante entered the guild of physicians and apothecaries. In the following years, his name is occasionally found recorded as speaking or voting in the various councils of the republic. A substantial portion of minutes from such meetings from 1298-1300 were lost during World War II, however; consequently the true extent of Dante's participation in the city's councils is uncertain.

Dante had several children with Gemma. Several people subsequently claimed to be Dante's offspring; however, it is likely that Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni and Antonia were truly his children. Antonia later became a nun with the name of Sister Beatrice.

Education and poetry[link]

Not much is known about Dante's education, and it is presumed he studied at home or in a chapter school attached to a church or monastery in Florence. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry, at a time when the Sicilian School (Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. His interests brought him to discover the Provençal poetry of the troubadours and the Latin writers of classical antiquity, including Cicero, Ovid, and especially Virgil.

Statue of Dante at the Uffizi, Florence

Dante says that he first met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, at age nine, and he claims to have fallen in love "at first sight", apparently without even speaking to her. He saw her frequently after age 18, often exchanging greetings in the street, but he never knew her well; in effect, he set an example of so-called courtly love, a phenomenon developed in French and Provençal poetry of the preceding centuries. Dante's experience of such love was typical, but his expression of it was unique. It was in the name of this love that Dante gave his imprint to the Dolce Stil Novo (Sweet New Style, a term which Dante himself coined), and he would join other contemporary poets and writers in exploring the themes of Love (Amore), which had never been so emphasized before. Love for Beatrice (as in a different manner Petrarch would show for his Laura) would be his reason for poetry and for living, together with political passions. In many of his poems, she is depicted as semi-divine, watching over him constantly and providing spiritual instruction, sometimes harshly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante sought refuge in Latin literature. The Convivio reveals that he had read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De Amicitia. He then dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools like the Dominican one in Santa Maria Novella. He took part in the disputes that the two principal mendicant orders (Franciscan and Dominican) publicly or indirectly held in Florence, the former explaining the doctrine of the mystics and of Saint Bonaventure, the latter presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas' theories.

At 18, Dante met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and soon after Brunetto Latini; together they became the leaders of the Dolce Stil Novo. Brunetto later received a special mention in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, XV, 28), for what he had taught Dante. Nor speaking less on that account, I go With Ser Brunetto, and I ask who are His most known and most eminent companions. Some fifty poetical components by Dante are known (the so-called Rime, rhymes), others being included in the later Vita Nuova and Convivio. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Comedy, regarding painting and music.

Florence and politics[link]

Dante, like most Florentines of his day, was embroiled in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. He fought in the Battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289), with the Florentine Guelphs against Arezzo Ghibellines; then in 1294 he was among the escorts of Charles Martel of Anjou (grandson of Charles I of Naples, more commonly called Charles of Anjou) while he was in Florence. To further his political career, he became a pharmacist. He did not intend to practice as one, but a law issued in 1295 required that nobles who wanted public office had to be enrolled in one of the Corporazioni delle Arti e dei Mestieri, so Dante obtained admission to the apothecaries' guild. This profession was not inappropriate, since at that time books were sold from apothecaries' shops. As a politician, he accomplished little, but he held various offices over a number of years in a city undergoing political unrest.

Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli's fresco, Chapel of San Brizio, Orvieto Cathedral.

After defeating the Ghibellines, the Guelphs divided into two factions: the White Guelphs (Guelfi Bianchi) — Dante's party, led by Vieri dei Cerchi — and the Black Guelphs (Guelfi Neri), led by Corso Donati. Although initially the split was along family lines, ideological differences arose based on opposing views of the papal role in Florentine affairs, with the Blacks supporting the Pope and the Whites wanting more freedom from Rome. Initially the Whites were in power, and they expelled the Blacks. In response, Pope Boniface VIII planned a military occupation of Florence. In 1301, Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip IV of France, was expected to visit Florence because the Pope had appointed him peacemaker for Tuscany. But the city's government had treated the Pope's ambassadors badly a few weeks before, seeking independence from papal influence. It was believed that Charles of Valois had received other unofficial instructions, so the council sent a delegation to Rome to ascertain the Pope's intentions. Dante was one of the delegates.

Exile and death[link]

Pope Boniface quickly dismissed the other delegates and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (November 1, 1301), Charles of Valois entered Florence with the Black Guelphs, who in the next six days destroyed much of the city and killed many of their enemies. A new Black Guelph government was installed and Cante de' Gabrielli da Gubbio was appointed podestà of the city. Dante was condemned to exile for two years and ordered to pay a large fine. The poet was still in Rome where the Pope had "suggested" he stay; Dante was therefore considered an absconder. He did not pay the fine in part because he believed he was not guilty and in part because all his assets in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs. He was condemned to perpetual exile, and if he returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could be burned at the stake. (The city council of Florence finally passed a motion rescinding Dante's sentence in June 2008.^[5])

A recreated death mask of Dante Alighieri in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

He took part in several attempts by the White Guelphs to regain power, but these failed due to treachery. Dante, bitter at the treatment he received from his enemies, also grew disgusted with the infighting and ineffectiveness of his erstwhile allies and vowed to become a party of one. Dante went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo I della Scala, then moved to Sarzana in Liguria. Later, he is supposed to have lived in Lucca with a lady called Gentucca, who made his stay comfortable (and was later gratefully mentioned in Purgatorio, XXIV, 37). Some speculative sources claim he visited Paris between 1308 and 1310 and others, even less trustworthy, take him to Oxford: these claims, first occurring in Boccaccio's book on Dante several decades after his death, seem inspired by readers being impressed with the poet's wide learning and erudition. Evidently Dante's command of philosophy and his literary interests deepened in exile, when he was no longer busy with the day-to-day business of Florentine domestic politics, and this is evidenced in his prose writings in this period, but there is no real indication that he ever left Italy. Dante's Immensa Dei dilectione testante to Henry VII of Luxembourg confirms his residence "beneath the springs of Arno, near Tuscany" in March 1311. In 1310, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg marched 5,000 troops into Italy. Dante saw in him a new Charlemagne who would restore the office of the Holy Roman Emperor to its former glory and also re-take Florence from the Black Guelphs. He wrote to Henry and several Italian princes, demanding that they destroy the Black Guelphs. Mixing religion and private concerns, he invoked the worst anger of God against his city and suggested several particular targets that were also his personal enemies. It was during this time that he wrote De Monarchia, proposing a universal monarchy under Henry VII.

At some point during his exile, he conceived of the Comedy, but the date is uncertain. The work is much more assured and on a larger scale than anything he had produced in Florence; it is likely that he would have undertaken such a work only after he realized that his political ambitions, which had been central to him up to his banishment, had been halted for some time, possibly forever. It is also noticeable that Beatrice has returned to his imagination with renewed force and with a wider meaning than in the Vita Nuova; in Convivio (written c.1304-07) he had declared that the memory of this youthful romance belonged to the past. One of the earliest outside indications that the poem was under way is a notice by the law professor Francesco da Barberino, tucked into his I Documenti d'Amore (Lessons of Love) and written probably in 1314 or early 1315: speaking of Virgil, da Barberino notes in appreciative words that Dante followed the Roman classic in a poem called the Comedy, and that the setting of this poem (or part of it) was the underworld, that is, Hell.^[6] The brief note gives no incontestable indication that he himself had seen or read even Inferno, or that this part had been published at the time, but it indicates that composition was well under way and that the sketching of the poem may likely have begun some years before. We know that Inferno had been published by 1317; this is established by quoted lines interspersed in the margins of contemporary dated records from Bologna, but there is no certainty whether the three parts of the poem were published each part in full or a few cantos at a time. Paradiso seems to have been published posthumously.

In Florence, Baldo d'Aguglione pardoned most of the White Guelphs in exile and allowed them to return; however, Dante had gone too far in his violent letters to Arrigo (Henry VII), and the sentence on him was not recalled.

In 1312, Henry assaulted Florence and defeated the Black Guelphs, but there is no evidence that Dante was involved. Some say he refused to participate in the assault on his city by a foreigner; others suggest that he had become unpopular with the White Guelphs, too, and that any trace of his passage had carefully been removed. In 1313, Henry VII died (from fever), and with him any hope for Dante to see Florence again. He returned to Verona, where Cangrande I della Scala allowed him to live in a certain security and, presumably, in a fair amount of prosperity. Cangrande was admitted to Dante's Paradise (Paradiso, XVII, 76).

In 1315, Florence was forced by Uguccione della Faggiuola (the military officer controlling the town) to grant an amnesty to people in exile, including Dante. But Florence required that, as well as paying a steep sum of money, these exiles would do public penance. Dante refused, preferring to remain in exile. When Uguccione defeated Florence, Dante's death sentence was commuted to house arrest, on condition that he go to Florence to swear that he would never enter the town again. Dante refused to go. His death sentence was confirmed and extended to his sons. Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honorable terms. For Dante, exile was nearly a form of death, stripping him of much of his identity and his heritage. He addresses the pain of exile in Paradiso, XVII (55-60), where Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather, warns him what to expect:

Mural of Dante in the Uffizi Gallery, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450.

As for the hope of returning to Florence, he describes it as if he had already accepted its impossibility, (Paradiso, XXV, 1–9):

Prince Guido Novello da Polenta invited him to Ravenna in 1318, and he accepted. He finished the Paradiso, and died in 1321 (at the age of 56) while returning to Ravenna from a diplomatic mission to Venice, possibly of malaria contracted there. Dante was buried in Ravenna at the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called San Francesco). Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice built a tomb in 1483.

Dante's tomb in Ravenna, built in 1780.

Cenotaph in Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.

On the grave, some verses of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, dedicated to Florence:

parvi Florentia mater amoris

"Florence, mother of little love"

The first formal biography of Dante was the Vita di Dante (also known as Trattatello in laude di Dante) written after 1348 by Giovanni Boccaccio;^[7] several statements and episodes of it are seen as unreliable by modern research. However, an earlier account of Dante's life and works had been included in the Nuova Cronica of the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani.^[8]

Eventually, Florence came to regret Dante's exile, and the city made repeated requests for the return of his remains. The custodians of the body at Ravenna refused, at one point going so far as to conceal the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Nevertheless, in 1829, a tomb was built for him in Florence in the basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante's body remaining in Ravenna, far from the land he loved so dearly. The front of his tomb in Florence reads Onorate l'altissimo poeta—which roughly translates as "Honour the most exalted poet". The phrase is a quote from the fourth canto of the Inferno, depicting Virgil's welcome as he returns among the great ancient poets spending eternity in Limbo. The continuation of the line, L'ombra sua torna, ch'era dipartita ("his spirit, which had left us, returns"), is poignantly absent from the empty tomb.

In 2007, a reconstruction of Dante's face was completed in a collaborative project. Artists from Pisa University and engineers at the University of Bologna at Forli completed the revealing model, which indicated that Dante's features were somewhat different from what was once thought.^[9][10]

Works[link]

See also Works by Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa"—"at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

By its serious purpose, its literary stature and the range—both stylistically and in subject matter—of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language. Dante was more aware than most earlier Italian writers of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time, and a unified literary language; in that sense he is a forerunner of the renaissance with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge (within the realms of the time) of Roman antiquity and his evident admiration for some aspects of pagan Rome also point forward to the 15th century. Ironically, while he was widely honoured in the centuries after his death, the Comedy slipped out of fashion among men of letters: too medieval, too rough and tragical and not stylistically refined in the respects that the high and late renaissance came to demand of literature.

He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of the other regional dialects. The aim was to deliberately reach a readership throughout Italy, both laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history, and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience—setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio, Milton or Ariosto, Dante did not really become an author read all over Europe until the romantic era. To the romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who sets his own rules, creates persons of overpowering stature and depth and goes far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters and who, in turn, cannot really be imitated. Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified, and by the time of the 1865 jubilee, he had become solidly established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world.

Profile portrait of Dante, by Sandro Botticelli.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy" in the classical sense refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

Statue of Dante Alighieri in Verona.

Dante's other works include the Convivio ("The Banquet")^[11] a collection of his longest poems with an (unfinished) allegorical commentary; Monarchia,^[12] a summary treatise of political philosophy in Latin, which was condemned and burned after Dante's death^[13][14] by the Papal Legate Bertrando del Poggetto, which argues for the necessity of a universal or global monarchy in order to establish universal peace in this life, and this monarchy's relationship to the Roman Catholic Church as guide to eternal peace; De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"),^[15] on vernacular literature, partly inspired by the Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun; and, La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"),^[16] the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The Vita Nuova contains many of Dante's love poems in Tuscan, which was not unprecedented; the vernacular had been regularly used for lyric works before, during all the thirteenth century. One of the most famous poems is Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare, which many Italians can recite by heart. However, Dante's commentary on his own work is also in the vernacular—both in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio—instead of the Latin that was almost universally used. References to Divina Commedia are in the format (book, canto, verse), e.g., (Inferno, XV, 76).

	Book: Dante Alighieri
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References[link]

Sources[link]

• Gardner, Edmund Garratt (1921). Dante, London, Pub. for the British academy by H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
• Hede, Jesper. (2007). Reading Dante: The Pursuit of Meaning. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Raffa, Guy P. (2009). The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-70270-4. 
• Scott, John A. (1996). Dante's Political Purgatory, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Seung, T. K. (1962). The Fragile Leaves of the Sibyl: Dante's Master Plan. Westminster, MD: Newman Press.
• Toynbee, Paget (1898) A Dictionary of the Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante. London, The Clarendon Press.
• Whiting, Mary Bradford (1922). Dante the Man and the Poet. Cambridge, England. W. Heffer & Sons, ltd.
• Allitt, John Stewart. (2011). Dante, il Pellegrino, Villa di Serio (BG), Edizioni Villadiseriane (in Italian).
• Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini La Divina Commedia riveduta e commentata - (1874-1890, 4 vol.)
• Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini Enciclopedia dantesca: dizionario critico e ragionato di quanto concerne la vita e le opere di Dante Alighieri - (1896-1898, 2 vol.)

External links[link]

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v t e Dante Alighieri Works in Latin De vulgari eloquentia  · De Monarchia  · Eclogues Works in Italian La Vita Nuova  · Le Rime  · Convivio Divine Comedy Inferno  · Purgatorio  · Paradiso "Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe"  · "Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi" Characters and places of Divine Comedy Alichino  · Barbariccia  · Ciampolo  · Cocytus  · Corso Donati  · Dis  · Eunoe  · Forese Donati  · Malacoda  · Malebranche  · Malebolge  · Piccarda  · Satan  · Scarmiglione Books, articles, concepts Contrapasso  · Cultural references in Divina Commedia  · Dante Encyclopedia  · Enciclopedia Dantesca People in Dante's life Jacopo Alighieri  · Guido Cavalcanti  · Brunetto Latini  · Beatrice Portinari In popular culture Dante and his Divine Comedy in popular culture  · Après une Lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata  · Dante crater  · Dante Park  · The Divine Comedy (symphony)  · Dante's Inferno (1924 film)  · Dante's Inferno (1935 film)  · Dante's Inferno (2007 film)  · Dante's Inferno (video game)  · Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic  · Dante Symphony  · Demon Lord Dante  · L'Inferno (1911 film)  · Italian battleship Dante Alighieri Book:Dante Alighieri Category:The Divine Comedy Portal:Literature