Dante's Divine Comedy: The Medieval Journey Through Hell

The Divine Comedy is a long poem written by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri between about 1308 and his death in 1321. It describes an imaginary journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio) and Heaven (Paradiso), and is one of the greatest works of world literature. Written in Italian rather than Latin while Dante lived in exile, it helped create the Italian literary language and has shaped the way Western culture imagines the afterlife.

Background: Dante and Florence

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, probably in late May or June, into a family of minor nobility. Florence was then a rapidly growing city of merchants, bankers and cloth-makers, and one of the largest cities in Europe.

As a young man Dante became a poet in the new “sweet new style” (dolce stil novo) of Tuscan love poetry. His greatest early inspiration was Beatrice, usually identified with Beatrice Portinari, whom he said he first saw when both were children. She married another man and died in 1290. Dante’s Vita Nuova (New Life), written in the early 1290s, tells the story of his love for her in poetry and prose.

Dante also took part in public life. He fought in the Florentine cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289 and joined a guild, the physicians and apothecaries, so that he could hold office. In the summer of 1300 he served for two months as one of the six priors, the city’s highest officials.

Exile

Florentine politics were bitter. The ruling Guelph party, broadly supporters of the papacy, had split into the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs. Dante sided with the Whites, who were more wary of the power of Pope Boniface VIII.

In 1301, while Dante was away on an embassy to the pope, Charles of Valois entered Florence as a supposed peacemaker and allowed the Black Guelphs to seize power. On 27 January 1302 Dante was sentenced in his absence for alleged corruption, fined and banished. On 10 March 1302 a second sentence condemned him to be burned alive if he ever returned.

Dante never saw Florence again. He spent the rest of his life moving between the courts of northern Italy, including Verona under the della Scala family, and finally Ravenna, under the protection of Guido Novello da Polenta. Exile shaped the poem deeply: it is full of Florentine politics, and characters in it foretell his banishment.

Writing the Comedy

Dante probably began the Comedy around 1307–1308, although some scholars place the start a few years earlier. The Inferno and Purgatorio seem to have been circulating by about 1314–1315, and the Paradiso was completed shortly before Dante died of a fever in Ravenna on the night of 13–14 September 1321. Tradition says the final cantos were found by his sons only after his death.

The poem is carefully structured around the number three, a symbol of the Christian Trinity. It has three parts, called canticles, each of 33 cantos, plus an introductory canto, making 100 in all. It is written in terza rima, a form Dante invented, in which lines rhyme in linked groups of three (ABA, BCB, CDC), giving the verse a forward momentum. The poem contains a little over 14,000 lines.

Dante called his work simply Commedia. A comedy, in medieval terms, was a story that moved from misery to happiness and was written in a humbler style than tragedy. Giovanni Boccaccio called it “divine”, and the title La Divina Commedia first appeared on a printed edition published in Venice in 1555.

The journey: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso

The poem opens on the night before Good Friday in 1300. Dante, “in the middle of the journey of our life”, finds himself lost in a dark wood. He is rescued by the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil, sent by Beatrice, who will guide him through Hell and Purgatory.

In the Inferno, Hell is a vast funnel inside the earth with nine circles. Sinners are punished in ways that mirror their sins, a principle called contrapasso. Above the gate is the famous warning to abandon all hope. Dante meets the lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, the Greek hero Ulysses, and Count Ugolino, starved to death in a tower in Pisa. At the centre Satan, with three faces, is frozen in ice, chewing the traitors Judas, Brutus and Cassius.

In the Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil climb a mountain on the other side of the world. Here souls who repented before death are purified on seven terraces, one for each of the seven deadly sins. At the summit lies the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, where Virgil, as a pagan, must leave and Beatrice appears.

In the Paradiso, Beatrice leads Dante upwards through the heavenly spheres of the planets and stars, meeting saints, theologians and his own crusader ancestor Cacciaguida. In the final canto Saint Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary, and Dante is granted a brief vision of God. The poem ends with “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

Politics and real people

One reason the poem still feels alive is that it is crowded with real people, many of them Dante’s contemporaries. He places popes, kings, Florentine politicians and personal enemies in Hell. Pope Boniface VIII, whom Dante blamed for his exile, is not yet dead in 1300, but the poem arranges for a place among the simoniac popes to be waiting for him.

Yet Dante also condemned the attack on Boniface at Anagni in 1303, the Outrage of Anagni, as an assault on the office of Christ’s vicar. He was critical of the papacy’s move to France under Clement V, the beginning of the Avignon Papacy. In his Latin treatise Monarchia he argued that the emperor and the pope each had authority directly from God in their own spheres.

The poem also records the art of his time. In the Purgatorio Dante notes that the painter Giotto’s fame had eclipsed that of Cimabue, and a usurer from the Scrovegni family, whose son paid for Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, appears in the Inferno.

Key people

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a poet, philosopher and politician. Besides the Comedy, he wrote the Vita Nuova, the Convivio, and a Latin defence of writing in the vernacular, De vulgari eloquentia.

Virgil (70–19 BC), the Roman author of the Aeneid, is Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory and represents human reason and classical learning.

Beatrice Portinari (c. 1266–1290) is Dante’s guide in Paradise and a figure of grace and divine love.

Cangrande della Scala (1291–1329), lord of Verona, was Dante’s patron; the Paradiso is traditionally said to be dedicated to him.

Legacy

The Comedy was copied and commented on almost at once. Several hundred manuscripts survive, many of them from the 14th century. In 1373 Florence, the city that had exiled Dante, appointed Boccaccio to give public lectures on the poem. The first printed edition appeared at Foligno in 1472.

By writing in the Tuscan dialect of Florence, Dante gave Italian a model of literary language. Together with Petrarch and Boccaccio, he is counted among the “three crowns” of Italian literature, and modern standard Italian is based largely on literary Tuscan.

The poem has inspired artists and writers for seven centuries, from Botticelli’s drawings and Michelangelo’s Last Judgement to William Blake, Gustave Doré, Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Famous English translations include those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867) and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Dante is buried in Ravenna. Florence built a memorial tomb for him in the church of Santa Croce in 1829, but it remains empty. In 2008 Florence’s city council symbolically revoked his sentence of exile. The 700th anniversary of his death in 2021 was marked across Italy.

The Comedy’s influence reaches well beyond literature. Its image of Hell as a funnel of descending circles, of Purgatory as a mountain, and of punishments that fit the crime has become part of everyday Western culture. Many Italian phrases come from the poem, and its characters, from Francesca to Ugolino, have been retold in opera, film and comics. Scholars study it as a key to medieval theology, astronomy, philosophy and politics.

Timeline

• 1265: Dante Alighieri is born in Florence.
• 1290, June: Death of Beatrice Portinari.
• 1300, Easter: The imaginary date of Dante’s journey; in the summer he serves as a prior of Florence.
• 1302, 27 January: Dante is sentenced and banished from Florence.
• 1302, 10 March: A second sentence condemns him to death if he returns.
• c. 1308: Dante is generally thought to be working on the Inferno.
• c. 1314–1315: The Inferno and Purgatorio are in circulation.
• 1321, 13–14 September: Dante dies in Ravenna, soon after completing the Paradiso.
• 1472: The first printed edition is published at Foligno.
• 1555: A Venice edition first uses the title La Divina Commedia.

Why it matters

The Divine Comedy gathers the religion, science, politics and passions of the Middle Ages into a single, intensely personal vision. It gave Italy its literary language, set a standard for epic poetry in a modern tongue, and continues to shape how people around the world picture Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.