Dante’s Inferno: A Visitor’s Guide to Hell

In most places across the world, speak the name of Dante, and your lis­ten­ers will think of Infer­no. Since its first pub­li­ca­tion more than 700 years ago, its depic­tion of Hell has become influ­en­tial enough to shape the per­cep­tions of even those who don’t believe that such a place exists. Take the thor­ough­ly Dan­tean idea that Hell is con­struct­ed of nine con­cen­tric cir­cles, each inhab­it­ed by a dif­fer­ent kind of sin­ner being eter­nal­ly pun­ished in a man­ner that reflects the nature of the offense. The glut­tons on lev­el three, for exam­ple, “are doomed to grov­el end­less­ly in thick, putrid mud” while “bom­bard­ed by icy rain.”

So explains Tom­mie Trelawny, cre­ator of the YouTube chan­nel Hochela­ga, in his twen­ty-minute expla­na­tion of Infer­no at the top of the post. While going over the broad out­lines of Dan­te’s Vir­gil-guid­ed jour­ney into the under­world, he address­es ques­tions you may not have con­sid­ered even if you’ve read this super-canon­i­cal poem before.

Why, for instance, was it writ­ten in the first place? “In Dan­te’s day, the top­ic of sin and pun­ish­ment was a major issue in the Church,” he says. Thus, “ideas around Hell were becom­ing more and more sophis­ti­cat­ed” in art and lit­er­a­ture, not least in order to send a cau­tion­ary mes­sage to the com­mon peo­ple.

For Dante, how­ev­er, the mat­ter was some­what more per­son­al. The poet “was embroiled in a con­flict between rival fac­tions in his native city of Flo­rence. He backed the wrong side, lead­ing to his exile.” Launch­ing into the com­po­si­tion of Infer­no there­after, he set about “putting peo­ple he dis­liked into his vision of Hell,” like the “cler­gy­men who used their posi­tions to amass wealth through church dona­tions rather than serv­ing their flock faith­ful­ly.” They were con­signed to the cir­cle of greed. It’s cer­tain­ly not with­out sat­is­fac­tion that Dante watch­es his real-life polit­i­cal rival Fil­ip­po Argen­ti get torn apart in the riv­er Styx of cir­cle five, reserved for the wrath­ful.

Sure­ly Dante — or at least the fic­tion­al Dante — was also com­mit­ting some kind of sin by rel­ish­ing in the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers, even oth­ers more sin­ful than him­self. But that’s less rel­e­vant to the sec­ond and third parts of the sto­ry, Pur­ga­to­rio and Par­adiso, which togeth­er with Infer­no make up what we now know as Dan­te’s Div­ina Com­me­dia, or Divine Com­e­dy. The lat­ter two-thirds of the work may be less wide­ly read than Infer­no, but they’re no less imag­i­na­tive; when we today describe an expe­ri­ence as pur­ga­to­r­i­al, we’re evok­ing on some lev­el the in-between realm for the mild­ly unvir­tu­ous that Dante envi­sioned on a far-flung island on the oth­er side of the earth. And if you nev­er did get around to read­ing Par­adiso, this video sum­ma­ry may pique your curios­i­ty about it, describ­ing as it does a sto­ry­line in which Dante goes to out­er space: a place very near­ly as inter­est­ing as Hell.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy: A Free Course from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Beau­ti­ful 19th-Cen­tu­ry Maps of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy: Infer­no, Pur­ga­to­ry, Par­adise & More

Rarely Seen Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Are Now Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Uffizi Gallery

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

Explore Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal, a New Dig­i­tal Data­base That Col­lects Sev­en Cen­turies of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.