The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno
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Lost in a dark wood in middle age and driven back by three beasts, Dante is met by the poet Virgil and led down instead. The nine circles below hold the people he knew — popes, neighbours, Florentine politicians — arranged by what they did and punished in the shape of it, each one glad to explain himself to a visitor who is going home.
About the book
Written in exile in the early fourteenth century, the Inferno is the first of the three canticles of the Commedia. Dante, lost in a dark wood at thirty-five and turned back by three beasts, is met by the shade of Virgil, sent by Beatrice, and told the way out is downward. The nine circles descend by the seriousness of the sin — appetite first, then violence, then fraud and treachery at the frozen bottom — and each punishment is the shape of the thing itself. What makes it a poem rather than a scheme is that hell is populated by the poet’s own century: Florentine politicians, popes he detested, a neighbour, a teacher, and the lovers Paolo and Francesca, who are the first souls he speaks to and who make him faint. Dante wrote it in Tuscan rather than Latin so that it could be read outside the universities, which is largely why modern Italian is Tuscan.
Characters
Dante — The pilgrim
The poet as his own protagonist, lost at midlife and taken down through hell before he can go up.
Virgil — Guide
The Roman poet, sent to lead him through hell and purgatory, and barred from going any further himself.
Beatrice — Intercessor
The Florentine woman who sends Virgil, and who takes over as guide where reason can go no further.
Charon — Ferryman
The boatman of the Acheron, who objects to carrying a passenger who is still breathing.
Francesca da Rimini — Second circle
Blown on the wind with her lover Paolo, and the first soul whose story stops the poet where he stands.
Farinata degli Uberti — Sixth circle
A Ghibelline leader rising from a burning tomb to ask about Florence and argue politics.
Ulysses — Eighth circle
Wrapped in a tongue of flame, telling of the last voyage past the known world that killed his crew.
Lucifer — Ninth circle
Frozen to the waist at the centre of the earth, three-faced, chewing the three arch-traitors.
About the author
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a Florentine poet, politician and exile. He was expelled from Florence in 1302 by the faction that took the city, under a sentence of death by fire if he returned, and he wrote the Commedia over the next twenty years in the towns that took him in, never going home. He wrote it in Tuscan rather than in Latin, which is a large part of the reason modern Italian is Tuscan. Beatrice, the woman who leads him through Paradise, was a real Florentine he saw perhaps twice and who died at twenty-four. He is buried in Ravenna, which has declined to give him back.