Divine Comedy Trivia
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110 free Divine Comedy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Divine Comedy trivia for readers who made it past the gate of Hell and readers who only remember 'abandon all hope'. The quiz opens with the poem itself: when Dante wrote it, why he called it a comedy, who added 'Divine', the Tuscan vernacular, terza rima, the 100 cantos, the three guides and the year 1300. Then it descends: the three beasts, contrapasso, Charon, the pope of the great refusal, Limbo's poets, Minos's tail, Paolo and Francesca, Cerberus and the mud, Geryon, Malebolge, Nicholas III upside down, Ulysses's last voyage, the wood of suicides, Brunetto Latini, Antaeus, Ugolino gnawing Ruggieri, and the frozen lake of Cocytus. Purgatorio and Paradiso get their share: the island mountain in the southern hemisphere, Cato at the shore, Easter morning, the seven Ps carved on Dante's forehead, Sordello, Statius, Pia de' Tolomei, the dolce stil novo, then the nine spheres, Justinian, Cacciaguida's prophecy, the eagle of just rulers, Trajan and Ripheus, the apostles' examination, Gemini and the heavenly rose. It ends with the world outside the poem: the White Guelphs and exile, Ravenna and malaria, the Foligno printing of 1472, Longfellow, Asín Palacios and Dante's real name. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso and Dante Alighieri, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard of Dante; the expert tier reaches Judecca, Bonagiunta and the Kitab al Miraj.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Rodin sculpture, first called 'The Poet', crowns a bronze doorway inspired by Dante's Inferno?
The Thinker
The Thinker. On The Gates of Hell the seated figure looks down on the damned, and the Rodin Museum describes him as Dante pondering his poem; shown alone from 1888, he outgrew the doors he was made for.
Q 02Which of these medieval figures was still alive when Dante finished the Divine Comedy?
Marco Polo
Marco Polo. The Venetian outlived Dante by more than two years; his own book, dictated to a fellow prisoner in Genoa in the 1290s, was already circulating in manuscript while the Comedy was being written.
Q 03In which language, rather than Latin, did Dante write the Divine Comedy?
Tuscan
Tuscan. A serious poem was expected to be in Latin, and Dante's choice of the everyday speech of his own region did much to make it the basis of standard Italian.
Q 04Who first attached the adjective 'Divine' to Dante's Comedy, in a treatise written in the 1350s?
Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio. Dante's own title was simply Comedìa; his admirer's adjective caught on, but it became a fixed part of the title only after it appeared on a printed title page some two centuries later.
Q 05Why did Dante call a poem that opens in Hell a 'comedy'?
It ends happily
It ends happily. In Dante's day a comedy was simply a story that starts in trouble and ends well, told in everyday language instead of tragedy's lofty style; his runs from Hell to Heaven in the common tongue.
Q 06What is the name of the interlocking rhyme scheme that Dante devised for the Divine Comedy?
Terza rima
Terza rima rhymes the middle line of each three-line stanza with the outer lines of the next (ABA BCB CDC), so every stanza hands the poem on. Shelley borrowed the scheme for 'Ode to the West Wind'.
Q 07What does Virgil represent allegorically as Dante's guide through Hell and most of Purgatory?
Human reason
Human reason: Virgil can show Dante what sin is and how to climb free of it, but reason alone cannot reach God. So he vanishes at the top of Purgatory, and another guide leads the way into Heaven.
Q 08Which saint, famed for his devotion to the Virgin Mary, guides Dante through the final cantos of Paradiso?
Bernard of Clairvaux
Bernard of Clairvaux: Dante turns to ask his guide a question and finds an old man standing in her place. Bernard's prayer to the Virgin then wins him the poem's last vision, a direct sight of God.
Q 09Which woman, ten years dead in 1300, leads Dante through Heaven in the Divine Comedy?
Beatrice
Beatrice: Dante says he fell in love with her when both were nine. After her death in 1290 he vowed to write of her what had never been written of any woman, a promise the Comedy keeps.
Q 10Which word closes all three parts of the Divine Comedy?
Stelle (stars)
Stelle (stars): Dante climbs out of Hell to see them again, leaves Purgatory ready to rise to them, and finishes the whole poem on the Love that moves the stars.
Q 11Which three beasts drive Dante back as he tries to climb out of the dark wood?
Leopard, lion and she-wolf
Leopard, lion and she-wolf: the she-wolf forces Dante back down into the dark, and there the shade of Virgil appears. He says she lets no one pass, so the only way out is the long road through Hell.
Q 12What is the term for the symbolic poetic justice by which each sin in the Inferno is punished?
Contrapasso
Contrapasso makes each punishment mirror or invert its sin. Fortune-tellers who tried to see ahead in life, for instance, walk forever with their heads twisted backwards.
Q 13Which phrase ends the inscription on the gate of Hell?
Q 21What is the name of the Eighth Circle of Dante's Hell, ten concentric ditches for the fraudulent?
Malebolge
Malebolge holds ten kinds of fraud, and Dante ranks all of them below murder. His reason: fraud is a peculiarly human vice, a misuse of the mind, so it offends God more than violence does.
Q 22Which pope, planted head-first among the simoniacs, mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII arriving early?
Nicholas III
Nicholas III, stuck upside down in a hole with his feet on fire, thinks the next pope due there has come early. Each new simoniac pope, he explains, rams the last one deeper into the rock.
Q 23Which hero, sharing a flame with Diomedes in Dante's Hell, tells of a final voyage past the Pillars of Hercules?
Ulysses
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here' closes nine lines in which the gate speaks for itself. The surprise comes just before: Hell, it says, was made by divine power, the highest wisdom and 'primal love'.
Q 14Who at first refuses to take Dante across the river Acheron because he is still alive?
Charon
Charon backs down when Virgil says the journey is willed in Heaven. Dante took the scene from Virgil's own Aeneid, where the same ferryman balks at carrying the living Aeneas.
Q 15Which pope is usually identified as the soul who made 'the great refusal', seen among the neutrals in Hell's vestibule?
Celestine V
Celestine V was an elderly hermit who resigned the papacy after five months in 1294. Dante never names the soul, but that abdication cleared the way for his great enemy, Boniface VIII.
Q 16In Limbo, which four poets welcome Dante as 'sixth in that high company' alongside Virgil?
Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan
Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan welcome Virgil home and take Dante into their circle. The poem crowns Homer 'sovereign poet', yet Dante had never read him: he knew no Greek, and the epics had not been translated.
Q 17In Dante's Hell, which monster shows each soul its circle by coiling his tail around himself?
Minos
Minos hears each soul confess, then wraps his tail around himself once for every circle it must drop. The tail is Dante's own touch: in the Aeneid the same judge decides by shaking an urn.
Q 18Which pair of lovers, killed by her husband, does Dante meet among the lustful in Canto V?
Paolo and Francesca
Paolo and Francesca fell in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and Francesca blames the book as their go-between. Her tale moves Dante so much that he faints.
Q 19Which guardian of the gluttons does Virgil quiet by throwing fistfuls of earth into its jaws?
Cerberus
Cerberus is drugged with a honey cake in the Aeneid, but Dante's Virgil just scoops up dirt and flings it down the three-headed dog's throats. It gulps the filth like any hungry dog and lets them pass.
Q 20Which monster of fraud carries Dante and Virgil down the great cliff into the Eighth Circle?
Geryon
Geryon has the face of an honest man, a serpent's patterned body and a scorpion's sting in his tail: fraud made visible. Virgil sits behind Dante on the ride down to shield him from that tail.
Ulysses' last voyage is Dante's own invention. The hero talks his ageing crew into sailing beyond the known world in pursuit of 'virtue and knowledge', and the sea closes over them all.
Q 24Which count is found gnawing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, who starved him in a tower?
Ugolino
Ugolino, a count of Pisa, was locked in a tower with two sons and two grandsons. The keys were thrown into the Arno, and in Dante's telling he watched the others starve before he died himself.
Q 25What is the Ninth Circle of Dante's Hell, the home of the traitors?
A lake of solid ice
A lake of solid ice: Cocytus is kept frozen by the wind from Satan's beating wings, and the traitors are locked into it. At the very bottom of Hell, Dante's worst sinners freeze rather than burn.
Q 26Which unchained giant lowers Dante and Virgil in his palm to the bottom of Hell?
Antaeus
Antaeus took no part in the giants' war on the gods. Virgil wins his help with flattery and an offer: Dante is still alive, he says, and can restore the giant's fame on earth.
Q 27Which innermost zone of Dante's Hell holds those who betrayed their lords and benefactors?
Judecca
Judecca is named for Judas Iscariot. For Dante no sin is worse than betraying a benefactor, and of the sinners Satan chews Judas suffers most: head-first in the jaws, with the skin clawed from his back.
Q 28Which river of boiling blood punishes murderers and tyrants in the Seventh Circle, patrolled by centaurs?
Phlegethon
Phlegethon holds each sinner at a depth that matches the blood he shed: tyrants stand in it up to their eyebrows, lesser killers only to their feet. Centaurs shoot at any who rise higher than their sentence.
Q 29Which beloved teacher of Dante's does he meet, to his surprise, among the sodomites on the burning sand?
Brunetto Latini
Brunetto Latini and Dante walk on together like master and pupil, Dante keeping his head bowed in respect. Brunetto's one request before he runs off is that his book, the Treasure, be remembered.
Q 30Into what are the souls of suicides transformed in Dante's Hell?
Gnarled, thorny trees
Gnarled, thorny trees: the suicides threw their bodies away, so they are denied a human shape. They can speak only when a branch is broken and bleeds, and at the Last Judgement their corpses will hang from their own boughs.