“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
Dante Alleghieri
Seven hundred years ago today, Dante Alleghieri died in exile, having long before been banned from Florence, a living purgatory that ironically gifted generations with his Divine Comedy, consisting of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradisio, written during his exile and completed a year before his death.
The work begins with Dante’s descent and travels through the nine layers of Hell, guided by the poet Virgil. Throughout his Inferno, Dante exacts revenge upon his critics, by reciting their tortures as he meets them in Hell, poetic justice in its truest form. This name dropping, no doubt entertained readers in his times, but this book and the remainder of his masterpiece are still enjoyed today. Apart from the breadth of his imagination, his work broke new ground by being written in the Tuscan Italian of the time, and not Latin, which was then read by the educated classes. This choice helped cement and broadened the use of the language, much as the King James Bible did with English.
Dante also used a new poetic form, iambic terza rima using three rhyming stanzas (aba bcb cdc, etc.), later used by Boccaccio and Petrarch, the other two most beloved of Italian poets.
I can’t say which of his three destinations Dante entered seven hundred years ago, but somehow I suspect that Virgil was there to greet him.
