Keys 02 · Dante Alighieri · written about 1308–1321
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Midway along the road of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost.
Inferno
The first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. A poet, lost in the middle of his life, is led down through Hell: past the sinners in their circles, through fire and into ice, to the center of the Earth, and out the other side to see the stars. It’s the most detailed map of evil ever drawn, and it is built like a machine.
- Key I · MapHell is a real place with a shape.
- Key II · DeeperThe deeper you go, the worse the sin.
- Key III · PunishmentsEvery punishment fits its sin.
- Key IV · PeopleHell is full of people Dante knew.
- Written
- c. 1308–1321in exile from Florence
- Language
- Florentineeveryday Italian, not Latin
- Cantos
- 34of 100 in the Comedy
- Lines
- 4,720
- Set in
- Easter 1300Good Friday to Sunday
- Circles
- 9
Key I · Map
Hell is a place, and it has a shape.
Dante’s Hell is a vast funnel under Jerusalem, reaching down to the exact center of the Earth. When Lucifer fell from Heaven, the land shrank away from him. It left the pit of Hell behind and piled up on the far side of the world as the Mountain of Purgatory.
The travelers go down the funnel, mostly turning left, pass the center, and come out at the foot of that mountain. Tap a level to see who is there.
Scroll the picture sideways to see all of it.
Key II · Deeper
The deeper you go, the worse the sin.
Hell follows an argument Dante took from Aristotle. Near the top are sins of appetite, where people lost control of themselves. Below them, behind the walls of the City of Dis, comes violence. Lower still is fraud, which Dante thought worse because it uses reason, the one gift only humans have, to do harm. At the very bottom is betrayal of the people who trusted you.
Weakness, then force, then deceit
Virgil lays the plan out in Canto XI, sitting beside a heretic pope’s tomb while they get used to the stench. Sins of desire are weakness. Violence is worse. Fraud is worst, because a person chose to use their mind against someone.
Two special cases
Limbo, at the top, holds people with no sin at all, only no faith. The heretics, just inside the city, are there for what they believed rather than what they did.
Fire is not the bottom
Fire is for the passions. The deepest sins are cold and calculated, and so is the place that punishes them: the pit ends in a frozen lake.
Key III · Punishments
Every punishment fits its sin.
Dante’s punishments aren’t random tortures. Each one turns the sin into its own penalty, a principle one of the damned names in Canto XXVIII: contrapasso, suffering in return. Try to guess a few.
Question 1 of 8
Which punishment did Dante give them?
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| Sin | Punishment | Why |
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Key IV · People
Hell is full of people Dante knew.
The Inferno is a spiritual journey, and also a settling of scores. Dante filled Hell with real people: politicians from his own city, popes, neighbors, even his old teacher. Some were still alive when he wrote about them.
He also pulls a trick with time. The journey is set at Easter 1300, but he wrote it years later. So the dead can “foretell” anything that happened in between, and several of them predict his own exile.
- True crime
Francesca da Rimini
died c. 1285 · Circle II
Killed with her lover Paolo, her husband’s brother, by her husband. A real murder from Dante’s lifetime.
- Neighbor
Ciacco
Circle III
A Florentine glutton nicknamed “the hog”, who predicts the violence about to split Florence.
- Grudge
Filippo Argenti
Circle V
A hot-tempered Florentine aristocrat. Dante is openly delighted to watch the others tear into him.
- Political enemy
Farinata degli Uberti
died 1264 · Circle VI
Leader of the rival party, still proud in his burning tomb. He predicts Dante’s exile.
- Tragedy
Pier della Vigna
died 1249 · Circle VII
Chancellor to Emperor Frederick II. Accused of treason and blinded, he killed himself. Dante lets him insist he was loyal.
- His teacher
Brunetto Latini
died 1294 · Circle VII
Dante’s mentor, whom he thanks for teaching him “how a man makes himself eternal”, even here.
- Pope
Nicholas III
died 1280 · Circle VIII
Stuck upside down in a hole for selling church offices. He mistakes Dante for the next pope due to arrive.
- Alive in 1300
Boniface VIII
died 1303 · place reserved
The pope Dante blamed for his exile. Still alive at Easter 1300, so Dante has another pope announce that he is on his way.
- Myth
Ulysses
Circle VIII
Punished for the trick of the Trojan Horse. Dante invents a last voyage for him that appears nowhere in Homer.
- True crime
Count Ugolino
died 1289 · Circle IX
A Pisan count starved to death in a tower with his sons and grandsons. In Hell he gnaws the skull of the man who did it.
- Still alive
Branca Doria
lived until c. 1325 · Circle IX
A Genoese noble who murdered his father-in-law at dinner. Dante says his soul is already in the ice while a demon walks around in his body.
- Traitors
Brutus and Cassius
died 42 BCE · the center
Caesar’s assassins, chewed forever in two of Lucifer’s mouths. Judas is in the third.
How it’s written
A rhyme that never lets you stop.
Dante invented a verse form for the journey, terza rima. Lines come in threes. The middle line of each group sets the rhyme for the next group, so every step leaves a thread hanging that the next step has to pick up. Hover over a rhyme to follow its thread.
- 1Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitaAMidway along the road of our life
- 2mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,BI found myself in a dark wood,
- 3ché la diritta via era smarrita.Afor the straight path was lost.
- 4Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa duraBAh, how hard it is to tell
- 5esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forteCwhat that wood was, so wild, rough and dense,
- 6che nel pensier rinova la paura!Bthat even thinking of it brings back the fear!
- 7Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;CIt is so bitter that death is hardly worse;
- 8ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,Dbut to tell of the good I found there,
- 9dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.CI will speak of the other things I saw.
- 10Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai,DI cannot rightly say how I came in,
- 11tant’ era pien di sonno a quel puntoEI was so full of sleep at the moment
- 12che la verace via abbandonai.Dwhen I left the true way.
It never closes. Rhyme E, in line 11, waits for lines 13 and 15. The chain runs to the end of the canto, where one extra line finally ties it off. The whole Comedy is 14,233 lines of this chain.
Three is everywhere. Three-line stanzas, three parts, 33 cantos in each part plus one opening canto for 100 in all, three beasts in the dark wood, and a three-faced Lucifer at the bottom of nine circles.
The descent
Now go down.
From here the page follows the journey, circle by circle. It narrows as the funnel does, and the gauge at the side shows how deep you are. It begins, as Hell does, with a door.
Canto III · The gate of Hell
The words over the door
Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; fecemi la divina podestate, la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
Abandon all hope, you who enter.
Through me you go into the city of grief,
through me you go into eternal pain,
through me you go among the lost.
Justice moved my maker on high:
divine power made me,
highest wisdom, and first love.
Before me nothing was created
but eternal things, and I endure eternally.
Read the sixth line again. Hell’s own gate says it was made by divine power, highest wisdom and first love: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Dante’s universe even Hell is part of a creation made out of love, which is exactly what makes it so terrible. Inferno III, 1–9
0
Canto III · Before the first circle
The Vestibule: the neutrals
- Sin
- Never taking a side. They share the vestibule with the angels who stayed neutral when Lucifer rebelled.
- Punishment
- They run forever behind a blank banner, stung by wasps and hornets. Worms at their feet drink their blood and tears.
- Guardian
- Charon, who ferries the damned across the river Acheron into Hell proper.
- Who’s here
- “The one who made the great refusal”, usually taken to be Pope Celestine V, who resigned in 1294.
Why this fits: they followed nothing in life, so they chase a flag with nothing on it. Heaven drove them out, and deep Hell won’t take them either.
che visser sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo
who lived without disgrace and without praise
I
Canto IV · Circle I
Limbo
- Sin
- None, exactly. These are good people who were never baptized: virtuous pagans, and infants who died too young.
- Punishment
- No torment at all. Only sighs, and a longing that can never be answered, in a green meadow beside a castle with seven walls.
- Who’s here
- Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, who welcome Virgil home and make Dante “sixth among such minds”. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Euclid. Saladin, alone to one side.
Why this fits: their only lack is faith, so their only pain is hope that has nowhere to go. It is also Virgil’s home. The guide is one of the lost.
che sanza speme vivemo in disio
without hope, we live in longing
II
Canto V · Circle II
The lustful
- Sin
- Letting desire overrule reason.
- Punishment
- Swept round forever in a howling black storm that never rests.
- Guardian
- Minos, the judge of the dead. He hears each soul’s confession and wraps his tail around himself once for each circle it must go down.
- Who’s here
- Cleopatra, Dido, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Tristan, and Francesca da Rimini with Paolo. They fell in love reading about Lancelot and Guinevere, and “that day we read no further”. Dante faints with pity.
Why this fits: passion carried them away in life. Now a wind does, for eternity.
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona
Love, which lets no one who is loved escape from loving
III
Canto VI · Circle III
The gluttons
- Sin
- Living for food and drink.
- Punishment
- They lie in stinking slush under an endless rain of cold, dirty water, hail and snow.
- Guardian
- Cerberus, the three-headed dog, who claws and tears at them.
- Who’s here
- Ciacco, “the hog”, a Florentine, who predicts the bloody feuds about to tear the city apart.
Why this fits: they made a god of their stomachs. Now they wallow in filth, blind and deaf to everything else.
Io sono al terzo cerchio, de la piova / etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve
I am in the third circle, of the rain eternal, cursed, cold and heavy
IV
Canto VII · Circle IV
The hoarders and the wasters
- Sin
- Two opposite sins about money: clinging to it and throwing it away.
- Punishment
- Two crowds shove enormous weights around the circle with their chests. They crash together, shout at each other, turn round and do it again, forever.
- Guardian
- Plutus, god of wealth, who greets them with gibberish: “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!”
- Who’s here
- So many clergymen, cardinals and popes that Dante remarks on it. None can be recognized. Their lives wore their faces away.
Why this fits: money was their whole world, so they spend eternity pushing dead weight in circles.
«Perché tieni?» e «Perché burli?»
“Why do you hoard?” and “Why do you waste?”
V
Cantos VII–VIII · Circle V
The wrathful and the sullen
- Sin
- Anger, both the hot kind and the sullen, smoldering kind.
- Punishment
- The furious fight each other naked in the swamp of the river Styx, biting and tearing. The sullen lie under the mud; their sighs rise as bubbles.
- Guardian
- Phlegyas, who rows the travelers across the swamp.
- Who’s here
- Filippo Argenti, whom Dante treats with open hatred.
Why this fits: they lived in rage or in resentment, so they drown in it.
Across the swamp rise the glowing walls of the City of Dis, lower Hell. Fallen angels slam the gates in Virgil’s face, the Furies threaten to show Medusa, and only a messenger from Heaven, touching the gate with a wand, gets it open.
Tristi fummo / ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra
We were sullen in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun
VI
Cantos IX–XI · Circle VI · inside the City of Dis
The heretics
- Sin
- Wrong belief. Here above all the Epicureans, “who make the soul die with the body”.
- Punishment
- Open tombs full of fire, spread across a plain inside the city walls. At the Last Judgment the lids will close for good.
- Who’s here
- Farinata degli Uberti, who rises from his tomb “as if he held Hell in great contempt”, and Pope Anastasius II.
Why this fits: they believed the soul ends in the grave, so their souls lie in graves, forever.
com’ avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto
as if he held Hell in great contempt
VII
Cantos XII–XVII · Circle VII
The violent
Three rings: a river of blood, a wood of human trees, and burning sand.
- Sin
- Force, used against other people, against oneself, or against God and nature.
- Punishment
- Tyrants and murderers stand in a river of boiling blood, sunk as deep as their crimes; centaurs shoot anyone who rises. Suicides grow as twisted trees that Harpies feed on. Blasphemers, sodomites and usurers lie, run or crouch on burning sand under a slow rain of fire.
- Guardian
- The Minotaur at the entrance, and centaurs along the river.
- Who’s here
- Attila the Hun. Pier della Vigna, an emperor’s chancellor. Brunetto Latini, Dante’s own teacher, whom Dante honors even here.
Why this fits: the suicides threw their bodies away, so they never get them back. At the end of time their bodies will hang from their own branches.
To go lower, the travelers ride down a great cliff on the back of Geryon, a monster with an honest man’s face and a serpent’s body: the picture of fraud.
Perché mi schiante?
Why do you tear me? (A tree, when Dante snaps off a twig and it bleeds.)
VIII
Cantos XVIII–XXX · Circle VIII
The fraudulent: Malebolge
- Sin
- Deceit: using the mind, the one gift only humans have, to cheat people.
- Place
- Malebolge, “evil pouches”: ten stone ditches in rings around a central pit, crossed by ridges of rock like bridges.
Hell has comedy too. Canto XXI ends with a demon signaling his squad by making “a trumpet of his arse”.
fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza
You were not made to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge. (Ulysses, urging his crew past the edge of the known world.)
∴
Canto XXXI · The well
The giants
Around the last drop stand giants, chained, rising out of the pit like towers. One of them is Nimrod, who built the Tower of Babel. He can only babble, “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi”: nobody understands him and he understands nobody. (The first page of Finnegans Wake thunders with the same Babel.) The giant Antaeus picks the two poets up and sets them down on the ice.
IX
Cantos XXXII–XXXIV · Circle IX
The traitors: Cocytus
The frozen lake, in four rings. The worse the betrayal, the deeper the ice.
- Sin
- Betraying people who trusted you.
- Punishment
- Frozen in Cocytus, a lake of ice so thick that a mountain could fall on it without a crack.
- Caina
- Traitors to family, named for Cain. Frozen to the neck, faces bowed.
- Antenora
- Traitors to country or party, named for Antenor of Troy. Count Ugolino gnaws the skull of the archbishop who starved him.
- Ptolomea
- Traitors to guests. Their tears freeze in their eyes. Some are still alive on Earth, their bodies run by demons.
- Judecca
- Traitors to their lords and benefactors, named for Judas. Sealed entirely in the ice, “like straw in glass”.
Why this fits: betrayal kills trust, the warmth that holds people together. So the bottom of Hell isn’t fire. It’s ice.
Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno.
Then hunger did what grief could not. (Ugolino. Did he die of hunger, or eat his children? Readers still argue.)
Canto XXXIV · The center of the Earth
At the bottom, down becomes up.
Lucifer, “the emperor of the sorrowful kingdom”, stands frozen in the ice up to his chest. He has three faces, red, yellowish-white and black, and six bat wings whose beating makes the wind that freezes the lake. In his three mouths he chews Judas, Brutus and Cassius. He weeps, and he never speaks.
- The only way out is down. Virgil takes Dante on his back and climbs down Lucifer’s shaggy side, between the fur and the ice.
- At Lucifer’s hip, the exact center of the Earth, Virgil turns himself upside down, head where his feet were, and starts to climb.
- Dante looks back and sees Lucifer’s legs sticking up in the air. They have passed “the point to which all weights are drawn”: a correct piece of gravity, written around 1320.
- The clock jumps too. Virgil said night was falling; now he says it’s morning. No time has passed: they are in the other hemisphere, where the day runs twelve hours apart.
- A hidden stream leads them up through the rock, toward the far side of the world.
Saturday, nightfall · Jerusalem time
Canto XXXIV, the last line
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And from there we came out, and saw the stars again.
Inferno ends
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And from there we came out, and saw the stars again.
Purgatorio ends
puro e disposto a salire a le stelle.
pure, and ready to rise to the stars.
Paradiso ends
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
All three parts of the Comedy end on the same word, stelle. There are no stars anywhere in Hell, and there were none on this page until now.
Afterword
What the poem did next.
The Thinker is Dante.
Rodin’s most famous statue began in 1880 as Dante, seated above his giant bronze Gates of Hell, looking down at his poem. The Kiss began on the same gates, as Paolo and Francesca.
Galileo measured Hell.
In 1588 the young Galileo gave two lectures in Florence on the shape, position and size of Dante’s Inferno, working out its depth and even Lucifer’s height from clues in the poem.
It made a language.
Dante wrote in the Italian people spoke in Florence, not in Latin, the language of serious books. That choice did more than anything else to make Tuscan the basis of modern Italian.
“Divine” came later.
Dante called it the Comedy: it ends happily and is written in a plain style. Boccaccio called it divine, and a Venice edition of 1555 put Divina in the title.
The bones.
Florence exiled Dante, and he died in Ravenna in 1321. When Florence asked for his remains in 1519, the friars in Ravenna had secretly emptied the tomb. The bones turned up in 1865, hidden in a wall. In 2008 Florence’s city council formally revoked his sentence.
Botticelli drew the map.
Botticelli spent years illustrating the Comedy. His Map of Hell, from the 1480s, is still close to the picture most people carry in their heads.
If you want to read it.
Choose a translation with notes.
Robert and Jean Hollander’s (2000) has the richest notes. Robert Pinsky’s (1994) keeps the sound of the rhyme. Mark Musa’s is clear and plain. Longfellow’s (1867) is free online.
Read a canto a day.
Thirty-four days gets you out the other side. Each canto takes about fifteen minutes.
Hear the Italian.
Even if you don’t speak it, the music of terza rima comes through. Roberto Benigni’s recitals are a good way in.
Keep the map open.
Knowing where you are in the funnel makes every canto easier to follow.
Use the free scholarly sites.
The Princeton Dante Project and Columbia’s Digital Dante have the text, translations and commentary.
Keep going after Hell.
Purgatorio is the most human part of the journey, and Paradiso the strangest.