By Dante Alighieri
 Dante Alighieri
 Son of a nobleman
 Born in 1265 in Florence, Italy
 Mother died when he was very young
 Received early education in Florence
 Was on his own by the time he was an
adolescent
 His great love seems to have been Beatrice
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Portinari.
They met when he was 9 and she was 8
He saw her frequently after age 18, often
exchanging greetings in the street, but he never
knew her well.
Dante worshipped Beatrice, but when he was 12,
his family arranged for him to marry someone
else.
After Beatrice’s death in 1290 at the age of 24, his
first book, “The New Life” (La Vita Nuova),
celebrated his love for her.
 Dante entered an arranged marriage in 1285 with
Gemma Donati, a noblewoman.
 They had four children; Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni
and Antonia.
 Records contain little else about their life together.
 One of his early sonnets Dante sent to the poet
Guido Cavalcanti, which started their friendship.
 Dante also dedicated his first book to Cavalcanti.
 All was not well in Italy during the
Renaissance.
 Rulers of the independent Italian states often
fought with each other to establish a large
political unit.
 The Guelph Political party (which favored
local authority & the Pope) and the Ghibelline
Political party (which favored old imperial
aristocracy) were two such rival factions.
 Dante’s birth in 1265 came at a time when the Guelph
party was in control of Florence.
 The Guelph political party, which supported Papal
rule, eventually divided into two groups:
 The Whites (supported imperial rule and
independence from Papal rule)
 The Blacks (supported Papal rule).
 Dante became a member of the Whites and served
as an ambassador to talk with the Pope in Rome
about conditions in Florence.
 While Dante was out of town, the Blacks took over
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Florence.
The Blacks sentenced Dante to banishment from
the city.
His punishment for return would be death.
His wanderings gave him time to write and to study
the Scriptures.
This banishment also gave Dante his perspective on
corruption of the fourteenth century papacy, a view
that he would clearly describe in The Inferno.
In Commedia Dante repeatedly condemns the
Popes for their involvement in politics.
 During his exile, he started to write his Commedia, a long story-poem
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through the three worlds of the afterlife, under the patronage of the
Ghibelline leaders.
About 1320 Dante made his final home in Ravenna, where he died on the
night of September 13-14, 1321.
La Divina Commedia was completed just before the poet's death.
He probably started to write it in 1307.
The Purgatorio was written in Verona, where he stayed more or less
continuously from late 1312 to mid-1318.
In Ravenna he wrote the final phases of The Paradiso.
By the time the first two parts of the Comedy had been sent in circulation,
Dante was being acclaimed through much of Tuscany as its greatest poet.
Dante's idea was to make the world of his poem a mirror of the world of
the Christian God of his era.
 The work was a major departure from the
literature of the day since it was written in
Italian, not the Latin of most other important
writing.
 Politics, history, mythology, and religious
leaders appear throughout The Divine
Comedy.
 Prominent people of the time, of literature, of
the past, and of Dante’s personal life –
including Beatrice – appear throughout The
Divine Comedy.
 The Divine Comedy was not titled as such by
Dante; his title for the work was simply
Commedia or Comedy.
 Dante’s use of the word “comedy” is
medieval by definition.
 To Dante and his contemporaries, the
term “comedy” meant a tale with a happy
ending, not a funny story as the word has
since come to mean.
 The Divine Comedy is made up of three parts,
corresponding with Dante’s three journeys:
Inferno (or Hell); Purgatorio (or Purgatory);
and Paridisio (or Paradise).
 Each part consists of a prologue and
approximately 33 cantos.
 Since the narrative poem is in an exalted form
with a hero as its subject, it is an epic poem.
 The Divine Comedy is a narrative poem
describing Dante’s imaginary journey.
 Midway on his journey through life, Dante
realizes he has taken the wrong path.
 The Roman poet Virgil searches for the lost
Dante at the request of Beatrice.
 He finds Dante in the woods on the evening
of Good Friday in the year 1300 and serves as
a guide as Dante begins his religious
pilgrimage to find God.
 To reach his goal, Dante passes through
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
 Dante and Virgil enter the wide gates of
Hell and descend through the nine
circles of Hell.
 In each circle they see sinners being
punished for their sins on Earth; Dante
sees the torture as Divine justice.
The sinners in the circles include:
 Circle One – Those in limbo (includes
virtuous non-Christian adults in addition to
unbaptized infants)
 Circle Two – The lustful
 Circle Three – The gluttonous
 Circle Four – The hoarders
 Circle Five – The wrathful
 Circle Six – The heretics
 Circle Seven – The violent
 Ring 1: Murderers, robbers, and plunderers
(those who were violent toward others)
 Ring 2: Suicides (those who were violent
toward themselves)
 Ring 3: Blasphemers (violent towards
God),Sodomites (violence towards nature),
Usurers (violence toward art)
 Circle Eight – The Fraudulent & Malicious
 Bolgia (ditch) I: Panderers and Seducers
 Bolgia II: Flatterers
 Bolgia III: Simoniacs (those who made profit from
sacred things)
 Bolgia IV: Fortune Tellers & Diviners
 Bolgia V: Grafters (sell or purchase positions in church or
state)
 Bolgia VI: Hypocrites
 Bolgia VII: Thieves
 Bolgia VIII: The Evil Counselors (spiritual theft)
 Bolgia IX: Sowers of Discord
 Bolgia X: Falsifiers, Evil Impersonators,
Counterfeiters, False Witnesses
 The Central Pit of Malebolge: The Giants
 Circle Nine – Traitors (Compound Fraud)
 Round One: Traitors to their kindred
 Round Two: Traitors to their country
 Round Three: Traitors to their guests
 Round Four: Traitors to their lords
 THE CENTER: Satan