Dante's Inferno

In canto 23 of Dante’s Inferno, Virgil and Dante witness hypocrites meeting their punitive fates in the Eighth Circle of hell. A hypocrite is a person who publicly professes to possess virtues,...

I think there may be a couple of reasons for this. One is that this is Dante's allegory of life, and as he is writing the story of a man who has strayed from the straight and narrow path to God,...

Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius are a perverse inversion of the Holy Trinity. These three are a trinity of evil. They dangle from Satan's mouths, perpetually in pain from being ground by his...

As Dante and Virgil approach the gates of Hell, Dante starts getting more than a little scared, not least because the inscription above the gates says "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."...

Dante envisions Purgatory as a mountain. The seven levels of Purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy are called terraces. At the top of the mountain is paradise. To get there, a person must be purified...

Dante Alighieri's three-part epic poem, the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia)—composed of Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise or Heaven)—is intended to convey the message,...

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is an Italian poet who modeled The Divine Comedy after Virgil’s Aeneid in the form of an epic poem. It is separated into three distinct parts: the Inferno, or Hell,...

Dante's Second Circle of Hell (the first after Purgatory) marks the first of the Sins of Incontinence. This refers to sins that are committed by virtue of one not being able to control their sinful...

Dante puts the sodomites at the bottom of the seventh circle of hell. That's bad. Within the seventh circle, there are three rings. In ring number 1, Dante puts people who killed for their own...

Virgil is Dante's guide to the underworld for several reasons. First, souls who have ascended to heaven, such as Beatrice, St. Lucia, or the Virgin Mary, are pure and not allowed to enter hell....

If Dante had a time machine, he would have been able to see the illustrations that both William Blake and Gustave Doré created for the entire Divine Comedy, not just Inferno. He could then have...

During Dante's time (the turn of the fourteenth century), the Catholic Church was known for greed and corruption. Dante's depicted hell is a place where the punishments for sinners fit their...

The major difference between the poet Dante and the character or pilgrim Dante is that the author is less sympathetic to the sinners in the circles of Hell than is the character. The poet Dante...

Remember, Lucifer has three faces and three mouths. You might argue that the three faces represent something like a satanic supervision of the Holy Trinity. You might also remember that being a...

As the Divine Comedy opens, the thirty-five-year-old Dante, halfway through his expected life of seventy years, has lost his sense of connection to God. He is experiencing a spiritual dark night of...

In the first canto of the Inferno, Dante is driven off his path by a she-wolf. It is then that he meets the Roman poet Virgil, who is to guide him through the underworld. Virgil warns Dante to...

It is difficult to imagine a work of literature of more importance to a national culture than Dante's The Divine Comedy. Not only did he write it in the Tuscan or Florentine Italian, this long poem...

The first circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno is described in canto 4. It is called Limbo. The people in this circle are not suffering in the manner of other denizens of Hell, because they are not...

Minos was an important figure in Greek mythology. Sometimes he was described as a human king and sometimes as the son of Zeus and Europa. He is famous for being heartless, as he would feed young...

The river and ferryman of Dante's Inferno are based on Greek myth rather than on Christian concepts of the afterlife, a reflection of Dante's work during the Italian Renaissance, when themes from...

The soothsayers are people who could foresee the future and who provided information to others based on what they saw. The classical soothsayer Tiresias from the Oedipus cycle is one example, and...

Allusions abound in Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the third part of his fourteenth-century epic poem, The Divine Comedy. In Inferno, Dante uses allusions—references to historical or cultural persons,...

In canto 1 of the Inferno, poet Dante finds himself wandering in a savage forest and spots a sun-lit hill in the distance. Blocked by three beasts—a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf—he gives up his...

In canto XXXIV of Inferno, Dante and Virgil have at long last reached the very bottom of hell, known as Judecca. This level of hell is reserved for people who have betrayed their benefactors, and...

The poet meets Francesca in canto 5 of Dante's Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Virgil has just led him into the second circle of hell, where he encounters the great beast Minos. The spirits in this...

Dante explores the numerous circles of Hell in this story, in each of which a different sin is relegated. Throughout the story we have seen the punishments for a number of terrible sins, and in...

Dante is the middle of life when he embarks on his journey to the underworld and then to purgatory and paradise. At 35—midway between birth and his expected death at 70—he has lost his way. He no...

The number 3 is everywhere in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. For one thing, the poem itself is structured according to the rhyme scheme terza rima, which uses stanzas of three lines that employ...

Dante's Inferno is indeed a religious allegory. Dante is involved in a spiritual journey which will take him down to the fiery depths of hell, through Purgatory, and then finally up into the...

Dante doesn't have much time for popes. At least for those who transgress what he regards as the appropriate bounds of their authority. There are numerous pontiffs in Dante's vision of Hell, cast...

The title of Canto 16 is "Violent against Nature." The three men are in hell, it seems, for sodomy. Their punishment is to clutch each other as in a dance, or like wrestlers, and wheel around...

The sinners in Dante's Inferno have committed a variety of crimes, from lust to murder, which may not seem to have much in common, but they all share the common theme of having preferred self will...

Dante's vision of perdition involves punishment for the souls of sinners in ways that mirrors the sins they were guilty of in life. This is what contrapasso refers to. Canto V deals with the second...

In Canto 3, as Dante and Virgil stand on the "melancholy shore" of the River Acheron, the last barrier to their entrance into the underworld proper, Dante describes the approach of Charon: And...

In canto 11 of the Inferno, Virgil explains to Dante some of the reasoning behind the layout of hell and, in particular, how the sins are ranked in order of iniquity. He tells Dante why even...

Inferno is a fourteenth-century epic poem written by famed Italian writer Dante Alighieri; it is the first part or cantica of his famous three-part poem the Divine Comedy, the other two being...

Inferno consists largely of a description of Hell and the various ironic punishments that await sinners of every variety. There are many different horrendous torments that await sinners, all...

Dante loves to make the abstract concrete and uses a number of literary devices to do this, including metaphor, simile, imagery, and personification. He also uses allusion and alliteration. In...

In canto 3 of Dante's Inferno, Dante encounters those people not fully dead, yet are no longer alive, who wait in the antechamber between Heaven and Hell. Here they're subjected to the meaningless...

The Divine Comedy is a fourteenth-century epic poem written by the famed Italian poet Dante Alighieri. It consists of three parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Heaven). The...

The historic Dante is dead. He died in 1321. However, the character Dante in the Divine Comedy is not dead. This can be confusing because he travels to places we associate with the afterlife: hell,...

The Divine Comedy was almost immediately recognized as a classic and work of genius, and its status as a masterpiece has remained largely unchanged for 650 years. Much of its appeal has been in how...

The generally accepted understanding of "canto" is that it is a single unit in the separation of a poem into sections. The word is derived from the Latin word cantus, meaning “song,” and...

Dante the poet portrays Satan (also called Lucifer or Dis) as having a body and appearance entirely frightening to Dante the pilgrim. Dante first sees Satan's gigantic body rising in the distance...

Canto VII of the Inferno focuses on the punishment meted out to the Hoarders and the Wasters. As Dante and his guide Virgil continue their descent through the Fourth Great Circle of Hell, they come...

The main setting of Dante's Inferno, as the title suggests, is hell ("inferno" is an Italian word that literally translates to "hell"). There are a few notable places within hell, or near to it,...