Inferno

Tradition:

Christian-esoteric / Italian medieval

Author:

Dante Alighieri

Form:

narrative poem

Approx. date:

c. 1314 CE

• 1Inferno · Canto 1 — The dark wood; the three beasts; Virgil

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Dante lost in the dark wood; the hill of light glimpsed but blocked by three beasts — leopard, lion, she-wolf. Virgil appears, sent by Beatrice, and offers to guide him through the altro viaggio — the journey through hell and purgatory.

  1,418 words
• 2Inferno · Canto 2 — Dante's doubt; the heavenly women

  Dante doubts whether he is worthy of the journey. Virgil reveals the descent of grace: the Virgin moved Lucy, Lucy moved Beatrice, Beatrice descended to Limbo to charge Virgil. The three heavenly women whose intercession makes the Comedy possible. Dante's fear lifted; the journey begins.

  1,247 words
• 3Inferno · Canto 3 — Gate of Hell; the neutrals; Acheron and Charon

  Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. The inscription on the gate of Hell. The Ante-Inferno of the neutrals — those who took no side, neither for God nor for the rebels — stung by hornets, pursued by their own banner. Charon's barque on the Acheron carries the damned across.

  1,273 words
• 4Inferno · Canto 4 — Limbo — the virtuous pagans; the great souls of antiquity

  First Circle: Limbo. The unbaptised infants and the virtuous pagans — those who lived before Christ or in lands without his word — held in a darkened castle without torment but without hope. The five great poets (Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Virgil) welcome Dante; the philosophers (Aristotle, Plato, Socrates) within the noble castle.

  1,379 words
• 5Inferno · Canto 5 — Second Circle — the lustful; Paolo and Francesca

  Second Circle: the carnal sinners, swept eternally by the infernal wind. Minos judges; the wind carries Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Paris, Tristan. Then Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo — Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse — pause to tell Dante their story. Dante faints from pity.

  1,298 words
• 6Inferno · Canto 6 — Third Circle — the gluttons; Ciacco prophesies Florence's strife

  Third Circle: the gluttons lying in foul rain and mud, guarded by Cerberus. The Florentine Ciacco prophesies the coming split of the Whites and the Blacks and the exile of Dante's party. The first of the political prophecies that will weave through the poem.

  1,249 words
• 7Inferno · Canto 7 — Fourth and Fifth Circles — the avaricious and prodigal; the wrathful in the Styx

  Fourth Circle: the avaricious and the prodigal, eternally pushing weights at each other, presided over by Plutus. Fifth Circle: the wrathful and the sullen — the wrathful tearing at each other on the Stygian marsh, the sullen submerged below the surface, lamenting from the muddy depths.

  1,187 words
• 8Inferno · Canto 8 — Crossing the Styx; Filippo Argenti; the City of Dis

  Phlegyas ferries Dante and Virgil across the Styx. The encounter with Filippo Argenti — one of Dante's personal political enemies. They reach the walls of the City of Dis, guarded by the fallen angels who refuse them entry — the first obstacle that Virgil cannot overcome by his own authority.

  1,289 words
• 9Inferno · Canto 9 — The Erinyes; the heavenly messenger opens the gates of Dis

  The three Furies threaten Medusa's gaze; Virgil shields Dante's eyes. A heavenly messenger arrives, parts the air with a wand, opens the gates of Dis without effort. The transition from the upper Hell (the sins of incontinence) to the lower Hell (the sins of malice within the burning city).

  1,372 words
• 10Inferno · Canto 10 — Sixth Circle — the heretics in their fiery tombs; Farinata, Cavalcante

  Sixth Circle: the heretics — chiefly the Epicureans who denied the soul's immortality — lying in fiery open tombs. Farinata degli Uberti, leader of the Ghibellines, rises haughtily from his tomb to speak with Dante. Cavalcante Cavalcanti asks pitifully after his son Guido.

  1,887 words
• 11Inferno · Canto 11 — Virgil expounds the moral plan of Hell

  The didactic chapter. On a great cliff overlooking the abyss, Virgil expounds to Dante the moral architecture of Hell: the upper circles for sins of incontinence; lower for sins of violence (against neighbour, against self, against God); the lowest for sins of fraud and treachery. The poem's ethical taxonomy.

  1,232 words
• 12Inferno · Canto 12 — Seventh Circle, first ring — the violent against neighbour; the river of blood

  Seventh Circle, first ring: the violent against neighbour, immersed in the boiling river of blood Phlegethon, guarded by the Minotaur and patrolled by Centaurs. Chiron sends Nessus to ferry Dante and Virgil; sees the violent (Alexander, Dionysius, Attila) immersed to varying depth according to their crimes.

  1,685 words
• 13Inferno · Canto 13 — Seventh Circle, second ring — the suicides as trees; Pier delle Vigne

  Second ring: the violent against self — suicides transformed into thorny trees, the Harpies feeding on their leaves. Pier delle Vigne, Frederick II's secretary who killed himself after being falsely accused, tells his story. The most ontologically wrenching punishment: the suicide refused even the body in which he died.

  1,625 words
• 14Inferno · Canto 14 — Seventh Circle, third ring — the blasphemers; the Old Man of Crete

  Third ring: the violent against God — blasphemers on burning sand, falling fire from above. Capaneus blasphemes still. Virgil tells the great allegory of the Old Man of Crete — the statue of the four ages of the world, whose tears form the rivers of Hell. The poem's cosmological vision.

  1,297 words
• 15Inferno · Canto 15 — Brunetto Latini — the sodomites under the fiery rain

  The violent against nature — the sodomites running beneath the falling fire. The poignant encounter with Brunetto Latini, Dante's old teacher of rhetoric. Vassene, e tornavi a casa. The tenderness with which Dante addresses his former master, even encountering him in hell.

  1,342 words
• 16Inferno · Canto 16 — The three noble Florentines; Geryon called from the abyss

  Three more Florentine sodomites — Jacopo Rusticucci, Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi — ask after their city's state. Dante tells them of Florence's ruin. At canto's end, Virgil orders Dante to remove his cord and casts it into the abyss; from the depths Geryon rises — the monster of fraud.

  1,684 words
• 17Inferno · Canto 17 — The usurers; the flight on Geryon to Malebolge

  The usurers — the violent against God in his goodness — sit on the burning sand with money-pouches at their necks. Then the great descent: Dante and Virgil mount Geryon, the wide-circling beast of fraud, and ride him down into Malebolge — the eighth circle, divided into ten bolge (pouches).

  1,246 words
• 18Inferno · Canto 18 — Eighth Circle: Malebolge — first two bolge: panderers, flatterers

  Malebolge — the ten ditches of fraud against the unsuspecting. Bolgia 1: the panderers and seducers, scourged by devils. Bolgia 2: the flatterers, immersed in human excrement. Jason among the seducers; Alessio Interminei of Lucca among the flatterers.

  1,307 words
• 19Inferno · Canto 19 — Bolgia 3 — the simoniacs, head-down in baptismal holes

  Bolgia 3: the simoniacs — those who bought or sold ecclesiastical office — buried head-down in baptismal-font holes with flame burning their feet. Pope Nicholas III, mistaking Dante for Boniface VIII, speaks. Dante's fierce denunciation of corrupt popes — one of his most direct polemical voices.

  1,449 words
• 20Inferno · Canto 20 — Bolgia 4 — the diviners and astrologers with heads turned backwards

  Bolgia 4: the diviners and astrologers, their heads twisted backwards on their bodies so they must walk weeping with their tears falling on their buttocks. Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Aruns, Manto; the long disquisition on Mantua's founding. The strangest single physical punishment in the Comedy.

  1,360 words
• 21Inferno · Canto 21 — Bolgia 5 — the barrators; the Malebranche devils

  Bolgia 5: the barrators (corrupt civic officials), boiled in pitch and pricked back under with grappling hooks by the Malebranche — Hell's diabolical police squad. The grimly comic chapter. The Malebranche led by Malacoda, who offers Dante and Virgil escort with a false promise.

  1,264 words
• 22Inferno · Canto 22 — Bolgia 5 continued — the comic-grotesque demons; Ciampolo escapes

  The Malebranche-chapter continues. The Navarrese sinner Ciampolo escapes by trickery. Two of the Malebranche fall into the pitch fighting each other. The grotesque-comic register of the Comedy, the long passage of demon-business that gives the canto its uniquely irreverent texture.

  1,431 words
• 23Inferno · Canto 23 — Bolgia 6 — the hypocrites in their cloaks of gilded lead

  Dante and Virgil flee the Malebranche by sliding down into Bolgia 6. Bolgia 6: the hypocrites — wearing cloaks gilded outside, lined with lead, weighing them down so they can scarcely walk. Caiaphas, Annas, and the council that condemned Christ — crucified to the ground, walked over by the others.

  1,653 words
• 24Inferno · Canto 24 — Bolgia 7 — the thieves; Vanni Fucci

  Bolgia 7: the thieves, bitten by serpents and transformed. The Pistoian thief Vanni Fucci, after being bitten and reduced to ash and re-formed, makes a blasphemous prophecy of the Black party's victory and Dante's exile — the famous e per ch'io ti farei accidente moment.

  1,471 words
• 25Inferno · Canto 25 — Bolgia 7 — the metamorphoses of thieves and serpents

  The thieves' metamorphoses continue. Five Florentine thieves — Cianfa, Agnello, Buoso, Puccio Sciancato, Francesco de' Cavalcanti — undergo grotesque transformations with serpents. The chapter that openly rivals Ovid and Lucan; Dante's most ambitious metamorphic poetry.

  1,259 words
• 26Inferno · Canto 26 — Bolgia 8 — the false counsellors; Ulysses's last voyage

  Bolgia 8: the false counsellors, wrapped in flames. Ulysses and Diomed share one flame for the trick of the Trojan horse. Ulysses tells the famous story of his folle volo — his mad last voyage past the Pillars of Hercules into the unknown ocean, where he and his crew were drowned within sight of Mount Purgatory.

  1,468 words
• 27Inferno · Canto 27 — Guido da Montefeltro — fraudulent absolution

  Guido da Montefeltro, encased in flame, tells how Boniface VIII tricked him into giving fraudulent counsel under promise of pre-emptive absolution — but St Francis at his death was defeated by a devil who argued the absolution was void because one cannot truly will fraud and repentance at the same time.

  1,514 words
• 28Inferno · Canto 28 — Bolgia 9 — the sowers of discord; Mahomet, Ali, Bertran de Born

  Bolgia 9: the sowers of religious, political, and familial discord, cleaved by a sword-bearing devil each time they complete a circuit. Mahomet split from chin to anus; Ali cleft from chin to forehead. Bertran de Born, who set Henry the Young King against his father, holds his severed head like a lantern.

  1,692 words
• 29Inferno · Canto 29 — Bolgia 10 — the falsifiers; the alchemists

  Bolgia 10: the falsifiers — counterfeiters of metals, persons, words, and money — afflicted with diseases. The alchemists (falsifiers of metals): Griffolino of Arezzo, Capocchio of Siena, plagued by leprosy, scratching themselves with their own fingernails.

  1,430 words
• 30Inferno · Canto 30 — Bolgia 10 continued — falsifiers of persons, words, and money

  More falsifiers. The falsifiers of persons (Gianni Schicchi, who impersonated the dead Buoso Donati; Myrrha) run as rabid hounds. The falsifiers of words and money (Sinon the Greek; Master Adam the counterfeiter) abuse each other — the canto's famous comic-pitiful low-tone quarrel.

  1,360 words
• 31Inferno · Canto 31 — The Giants — Nimrod, Ephialtes, Antaeus

  The descent toward the lowest circle. The giants — Nimrod (whose unintelligible Raphèl maí amècche zabí almi is the only language Dante reports him speaking), Ephialtes, Antaeus — chained around the pit. Antaeus, unchained, lifts Dante and Virgil down into the ninth circle.

  1,362 words
• 32Inferno · Canto 32 — Ninth Circle — Caïna, Antenora; the traitors frozen in Cocytus

  Ninth Circle — Cocytus, the frozen lake. Caïna (traitors to kin) — Camicione de' Pazzi; the Alberti brothers frozen face-to-face. Antenora (traitors to country) — Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed Florence at Montaperti. The most savage descriptive register of the Inferno.

  1,571 words
• 33Inferno · Canto 33 — Ugolino della Gherardesca; Ptolomea

  The famous canto of Count Ugolino, frozen in Antenora, eternally gnawing the head of Archbishop Ruggieri who imprisoned him with his sons and starved them to death. Poi che la fame poté più che 'l dolore. Then Ptolomea — traitors to guests — frozen face-up so even their tears freeze the eyes shut.

  2,027 words
• 34Inferno · Canto 34 — Lucifer at the centre; the climb out to see the stars again

  The lowest point. Judecca — traitors to lords and benefactors — wholly enclosed in ice. Lucifer, three-faced, chewing Judas in the central mouth, Brutus and Cassius in the others. Dante and Virgil climb down Lucifer's flank, cross the centre of the earth, and emerge — a riveder le stelle — to see the stars again.

  98,612 words

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