70 Fun Facts About Dante Alighieri

Which Roman poet guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory?

Virgil stands for human reason, which can take Dante only so far: at the top of Purgatory he vanishes without a word of farewell, and Dante weeps to find him gone.

Who takes over from Beatrice as Dante's guide for the final cantos of Paradiso?

Bernard of Clairvaux arrives unannounced: Dante turns to ask Beatrice a question and finds an old man standing in her place, and it is his prayer to the Virgin Mary that wins Dante the final vision of God.

Dante's Comedy has 100 cantos: three parts of 33 and one what?

Introduction: the first canto, with Dante lost before the journey starts, opens the whole poem rather than Hell alone, which is why Inferno has one canto more than the other two parts.

What is the interlocking rhyme scheme of Dante's Divine Comedy called?

Terza rima chains its tercets ABA BCB CDC, each middle line setting the next stanza's rhyme; Dante invented it for this poem, and Shelley later borrowed it for 'Ode to the West Wind'.

Who first attached the adjective 'Divine' to the poem Dante had simply called Comedy?

Boccaccio, author of the Decameron, is the first known to have called the poem 'divine', and in 1373 he gave public lectures on it in Florence; the word reached a title page only in a Venetian edition of 1555.

Which single word ends each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy?

Stelle, 'stars', closes Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso alike: Dante comes out of Hell 'to see again the stars', and the whole poem ends on 'the Love that moves the sun and the other stars'.

Dante set his journey in 1300, the year the Church held its first what?

Jubilee pilgrims so crowded Rome in 1300 that Dante, in Inferno, compares two files of sinners to the two-way traffic the Romans set up on the bridge to St Peter's.

On which Christian holy day does Dante go down into Hell in the Divine Comedy?

Good Friday is the day Dante goes down into Hell, and he comes out at the foot of Mount Purgatory just before dawn on Easter Sunday, so his time below runs from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection.

Which three beasts block Dante's path?

A lion, a leopard and a she-wolf echo the three beasts of Jeremiah 5:6; what each stands for is still debated, but it is the she-wolf, gaunt with hunger, that finally drives Dante back down the hill.

Which circle of Dante's Hell holds Homer, Plato and Aristotle?

Limbo holds souls guilty of no sin except living without baptism, so their one punishment is to long for a God they will never see; Dante gives its poets and philosophers a noble castle and a green meadow.

The inscription over the gate of Dante's Hell famously ends with which words?

'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here' is the last line over the gate; just inside, souls who took no side in life race for ever after a whirling banner, stung by flies and wasps.

The shade who made 'the great refusal' in Dante's Inferno is usually identified as which pope, who resigned the office?

Celestine V, a hermit monk, abdicated five months after his election in 1294; Dante leaves the shade unnamed, but the resignation opened the way for the pope who became his bitterest enemy.

Who at first refuses to ferry the living Dante across the Acheron?

Charon, his eyes ringed with wheels of flame, orders the living man away from the dead, until Dante's guide silences him: 'It is so willed there where is power to do that which is willed.'

Which classical judge of the dead assigns each damned soul to its circle by coiling his tail?

Minos hears each soul's full confession, then coils his tail around himself once for every circle it must fall; Dante remade the king of Crete as a growling monster.

Which beast of classical myth guards the gluttons in Dante's Third Circle?

Cerberus claws and flays the gluttons as they lie in filthy slush under endless rain, and Dante's guide quiets his three throats by flinging in fistfuls of earth.

Francesca da Rimini, whom Dante meets among the lustful, fell in love with which man?

Paolo, her brother-in-law, never speaks: he weeps beside her as she tells their story; her husband Gianciotto had caught and killed them both, and the two are swept along together on Hell's ceaseless wind.

Dante's Francesca says she and her lover yielded to passion while reading about which legendary couple?

Lancelot and Guinevere's first kiss was the passage that undid them: Francesca calls the book a 'Galeotto', after the knight who brought those lovers together, and adds, 'That day we read no further.'

Farinata degli Uberti, whom Dante meets in a flaming tomb, is punished in the circle of which sin?

Heresy, for Dante, covers the Epicureans, who held that the soul dies with the body, so they lie in fiery tombs; Farinata is the Ghibelline chief who alone spoke against razing Florence.

In Dante's Seventh Circle, murderers and tyrants are immersed in what?

A river of boiling blood, the Phlegethon, holds those who shed blood in life, each sunk as deep as his guilt, while centaurs on the bank shoot any who rise too high.

Which monster of fraud carries Dante and his guide down the cliff to the Eighth Circle?

Geryon has an honest man's face on a serpent's body with a scorpion's sting, fraud with a pleasant front; he is summoned by dropping the cord from Dante's waist into the abyss.

What is the name of the Eighth Circle of Dante's Hell, ten concentric ditches for the fraudulent?

Malebolge, roughly 'evil ditches', gives each kind of fraud its own trench: flatterers wallow in filth, and hypocrites trudge under cloaks gilded outside and lined with lead.

Which Greek hero among Dante's counsellors of fraud tells of a last voyage past the Pillars of Hercules?

Ulysses, wrapped in a tongue of flame, tells how he talked his ageing crew into sailing beyond the known world 'for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge', until a whirlwind sank the ship.

Which soul, starved in a Pisan tower with his sons, gnaws his betrayer's skull in Dante's Hell?

Ugolino della Gherardesca gnaws Archbishop Ruggieri, who had him locked up to starve; his last line, that hunger did what grief could not, has been read both as his death and as cannibalism.

What is the Ninth Circle of Dante's Hell, home of the traitors, made of?

A frozen lake holds the traitors fixed in place, the worst of them wholly under the surface; the wind from Lucifer's beating wings keeps it solid, so the pit of Hell is cold, not fiery.

Who is chewed in the central mouth of Lucifer at the bottom of Dante's Hell?

Judas Iscariot suffers worst of the three: his head is inside the mouth with his legs kicking out, and Lucifer's claws strip the skin from his back, while Caesar's assassins hang from the side mouths.

How do Dante and his guide finally get out of Hell?

By climbing down Lucifer's body: the guide grips the shaggy hide, descends to the hip at the centre of the earth, then turns head over heels and climbs, and Dante is baffled to see the legs sticking up.

Where does Dante place the Mountain of Purgatory?

On an island in the southern ocean, the only land in a hemisphere of water: Dante's guide suggests the mountain was thrown up when Satan fell from heaven and the earth recoiled from him.

Which Roman, a pagan who killed himself rather than live under Caesar, guards the foot of Dante's Purgatory?

Cato of Utica had three strikes against him in Dante's scheme, yet Dante sets him over the mountain where souls win their freedom, it seems because he gave his own life for liberty.

At the gate of Purgatory an angel carves which letter, one for each deadly sin, on Dante's forehead?

P stands for peccatum, Latin for sin: the angel cuts the letters with the point of his sword, and one is brushed away by an angel's wing each time Dante leaves a terrace.

Which sin do souls purge under huge stones in Dante's Purgatory?

Pride is purged first: its penitents creep bent double under boulders, and Dante admits this is the terrace he dreads coming back to, saying he can already feel its weights on his own back.

Which Roman poet, author of the Thebaid, joins Dante and his guide on the upper slopes of Purgatory?

Statius is freed just as they pass: the mountain shakes whenever a soul is ready to rise, and he tells Dante's guide, 'Through thee I Poet was, through thee a Christian.'

At the summit of Dante's Purgatory, which river of classical myth is he plunged into before rising to Heaven?

Lethe washes away even the memory of his sins; Dante is pulled through it and made to swallow, then drinks from a second stream, Eunoe, which brings back the memory of every good deed.

Which sphere of Dante's Heaven holds Piccarda and others who broke their vows?

The Moon, with its changing face, suits those whose vows gave way: Piccarda was a nun taken from her convent and forced to marry, yet she tells Dante she wants no higher place, since God's will is her peace.

Which emperor, the codifier of Roman law, speaks every line of one canto of Dante's Paradiso?

Justinian opens with 'Caesar I was, and am Justinian', his title left behind on earth, then traces the flight of the Roman eagle down the centuries; he appears among souls who did good partly for fame.

Which crusader ancestor of Dante prophesies his exile and tells him to write what he has seen?

Cacciaguida, Dante's great-great-grandfather, was knighted on the Second Crusade and died on it; he foretells the exile, warning Dante how salty another man's bread will taste.

What lies beyond the heavenly spheres at the very top of Dante's cosmos?

The Empyrean lies outside space and time: there Dante sees the blessed ranked in a vast rose, with angels flying between it and God like bees between flowers and hive.

Which theologian, whose thought underpins the Divine Comedy, speaks to Dante in the heaven of the Sun?

Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, spends his speech praising Saint Francis, founder of the rival order, and the Franciscan Bonaventure returns the courtesy by praising Saint Dominic.

The Comedy's opening line places Dante where on life's road?

Halfway: 'Midway upon the journey of our life' meant 35, half the Bible's seventy years, and with the poem set in 1300 that line is how Dante's birth is dated to 1265.

What from Beatrice overjoyed Dante nine years after he first saw her?

A greeting in the street: Dante says it was the first time her words had reached his ears, and he went home, dreamed of her and wrote a sonnet about the dream.

Whom did Dante actually marry, a woman he never once mentioned in his poetry?

Gemma Donati came from the same clan as a leader of the faction that later exiled Dante; the woman his poetry made famous, Beatrice, married another man.

Which regional dialect did Dante choose over Latin for the Divine Comedy?

Tuscan, the speech of his native Florence, was only one of Italy's many dialects when Dante chose it over Latin; the Comedy's prestige helped turn it into the national language.

Dante closed his book about the dead Beatrice vowing to do what?

Write a greater work: after her death in 1290 he resolved to say of Beatrice 'what hath not before been written of any woman', and the Divine Comedy, where she leads him through Heaven, kept the promise.

Which guild did Dante join to qualify for public office in Florence?

Physicians and Apothecaries: public office in Florence was open only to guild members, so Dante enrolled around 1295, and within five years he was one of the city's six priors.

In which role did Dante fight at the battle of Campaldino?

Cavalryman: Dante rode in the front rank of Florence's cavalry against the army of Arezzo, and the victory was followed by reforms that made guild membership the way into public office.

Dante belonged to which faction of Florentine politics?

The White Guelphs wanted Florence freer of Rome, while their Black rivals backed the pope; when the Blacks took the city in 1301 with papal help, the Whites, and Dante with them, were driven out.

Which pope sent Charles of Valois into Florence in 1301, opening the way to Dante's exile?

Boniface VIII is said to have kept Dante behind in Rome as an envoy while the city fell; Dante's revenge, in Inferno, was to have a damned pope mistake him for Boniface arriving early in Hell.

What punishment awaited Dante if he had returned to Florence without paying his fine?

Burning at the stake was added to his sentence in 1302, after a charge of corruption during his two months as a prior; he later turned down an amnesty because it required public penance.

In Paradiso, what does Dante see kept ready for Emperor Henry VII, the ruler he hoped would restore Italy?

An empty throne, already marked with a crown, waits in the heavenly rose for Henry VII, who Beatrice says will come to set Italy right before she is ready; he died on campaign in 1313, his mission a failure.

Cangrande della Scala, the patron Dante praises in Paradiso, sheltered the exiled poet as lord of which city?

Verona's young lord took the exiled Dante in; in Paradiso the poet's ancestor tells him to rely on Cangrande, whose generosity will be such that even his enemies cannot keep quiet about it.

Which city, where Dante died in exile, still holds his remains?

Ravenna has refused ever since to give him back: Florence, the city that exiled him, built a tomb for him in Santa Croce in 1829, and no one has ever been buried in it.

What killed Dante in 1321?

He caught it returning from a diplomatic mission to Venice on behalf of his host, Guido da Polenta.

Which of Dante's works did a papal legate condemn as heretical a few years after the poet's death?

Monarchia argues that the emperor's power comes straight from God and not through the pope, so a papal legate had it thrown on a bonfire in Bologna.

Which early work by Dante, written before his exile, tells the story of his love for Beatrice?

La Vita Nuova, 'The New Life', threads his early love poems on a prose story; one poem stops after a single stanza because, Dante says, the news of her death reached him while he was writing it.

Which Latin treatise did Dante leave unfinished after arguing that serious poetry could be written in Italian?

De vulgari eloquentia, 'On Eloquence in the Vernacular', reviews some fourteen Italian dialects and scorns nearly all of them as too rough for poetry; planned in four books, it stops midway through the second.

Which Florentine painter drew a picture for nearly every canto of the Divine Comedy, including a famous map of Hell?

Botticelli drew them on sheepskin for a Medici patron and coloured only a few before he stopped; 92 sheets survive, split between Berlin and the Vatican.

Who was the first American to translate the whole Divine Comedy?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had friends in every Wednesday to check his drafts, and that 'Dante Club' grew into the Dante Society of America, which he helped found in 1881.

Which scientist is known to have lectured on the geography of Dante's Inferno?

Galileo Galilei was 24 when the Florentine Academy asked him to work out the size and shape of Dante's Hell; the two lectures won him a mathematics post at Pisa, though he later saw that his sums were wrong.

Which poet wrote that Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, with no third?

T. S. Eliot made the claim in an essay on Dante, and he had long borrowed from him: his own 'Prufrock' opens with six lines of Inferno left in the original Italian.

Miguel Asín Palacios argued in 1919 that Dante borrowed from which tradition's accounts of the afterlife?

Islamic accounts of Muhammad's night journey through hell and heaven were his evidence; one had been put into Latin in Spain in the later thirteenth century, and may have reached Dante through his teacher Brunetto Latini.

Which singer built the 2023 album Unreal Unearth around a descent through the nine circles of Dante's Hell?

Hozier began reading the Inferno during lockdown and used it as the album's frame, saying he wanted the feeling of going down into something and coming out the other side.

Dante built his 14,233-line Comedy around the number three, a pattern usually read as honouring what?

The Holy Trinity: the poem has three realms, and even its Satan is given three faces as a grotesque parody of God.

What was staged for Dante in Florence in 2021, 700 years after his death?

A mock retrial: jurists met by video link to reconsider the corruption conviction that exiled him, thirteen years after the city council had voted to revoke the sentence.

Verses in Paradiso suggest Dante was born under which zodiac sign?

Gemini: reaching the constellation in Paradiso, Dante says the sun was rising and setting in that sign when he first breathed his native air, which is how his late-spring birthday is worked out.

What was the profession of Dante's father, Alighiero di Bellincione?

Moneylender, most likely, an awkward trade for the father of a poet whose Inferno leaves usurers crouching under a rain of fire.

Which painter does Dante say has eclipsed the fame of Cimabue?

Giotto 'now has the cry', a penitent artist tells Dante in Purgatorio, using Cimabue's dimmed fame to warn that every reputation is soon overtaken.

Which Rodin sculpture, first called The Poet, was made to crown his Dante-inspired Gates of Hell?

The Thinker sat at the top of the portal as The Poet, usually taken to be Dante gazing down on the circles of Hell; exhibited alone from 1888, it shed that name.

Dante's last host in exile was the nephew of which woman he had written into the Comedy?

Francesca da Rimini was born a da Polenta, and her nephew Guido Novello took Dante in years after the Inferno had told how her husband killed her.

Which artist backed Florence's 1519 bid for Dante's bones and was to build his new tomb?

Michelangelo never got to build it: when Florence's envoys opened the sarcophagus it was empty, because the friars guarding it had already smuggled the bones out.

Italy's first vessel of which type, completed in 1913, was named Dante Alighieri?

A dreadnought: the Dante Alighieri was a wartime flagship that never met the enemy in battle, because Austria-Hungary's battleships rarely left port.

In Dante's Inferno, how are fortune-tellers punished for trying to see the future?

Their heads are twisted backwards, so they must walk in reverse, weeping; Dante weeps too at the sight, until his guide rebukes him for pitying the damned.