Faces from Dante's Inferno: Who they are, what they say, and what it all means

By Peter Celano

Midway upon his journey in life, Dante wrote a powerful little book about hell. No one had ever created such an elaborate architecture for the underworld before. The result shocked Dante’s contemporaries – and still inspires fear and mystery in those who read it today. This brief introduction to the text will introduce you to 50 faces of those who appear in Dante’s hell, to discover what the world looks like without grace, love, and mercy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781612614243

Peter Celano

Peter Celano is a writer and editor at Paraclete Press who is also the recent author of the popular book, My Year with the Saints for Kids.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

A PORTRAIT OF DANTE ALIGHIERI

The great poet we all know simply as Dante was born in Florence, Italy, most likely in 1265. Experts have settled on that year largely because of what Dante says at the beginning of the Inferno:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

(I, lines 1–3)

Everyone in Dante’s day used a phrase from the Bible, Psalm 90 (or Psalm 89, as they were numbered in the medieval Latin Vulgate), to understand that the average life span of a human being was 70 years. Threescore and ten, it still reads in the Douay-Rheims translation. So it is fairly safe to assume that Dante was 35 years old when the fictional events of the Inferno open, in the year 1300.

His full name was Durante degli Alighieri.

By most accounts, he is to be considered the narrator and subject of his Divine Comedy. He is the hero of his own poem, although it has become common to refer to this main character, the narrator who follows Virgil through every stage of hell, discovering and recording all of its atrocities, as simply the pilgrim.

Dante was brought up in a well-to-do family, educated at fine schools, and taught to recite great poetry from an early age. His family was also proudly Roman, and was often engulfed in the difficult political climate of those days in Florence. Dante would become a victim of these political alliances, himself, in his