Dante himself stated that the canticle of hell was meant to strike terror into the hearts of men, in his letter to Cangrande della Scala. He describes so minutely the punishment and pain that the condemned souls suffer in the first kingdom of the afterlife so that the fear of

In many places in Dante’s hell, the condemned souls are still able to secrete organic ‘humors’ just as their body had done during their life on earth. With the exception of blood, these are essentially ‘vile,’ putrid humors that are part of the final phase of human digestion, that is

For seven centuries, Dante exegetes have offered opinions about the prophetic figure of the hunting hound in Inferno I, ll. 101-102, who will free mankind from the ‘she-wolf’ that symbolizes greed. All one has to do is look at the entry on ‘veltro’ (greyhound) in the Enciclopedia Dantesca to realize

Twice in the Divine Comedy Dante urges readers to pay special attention to what is about to happen, in two tercets which interrupt the flow of the story; their function is to advise readers that very soon they will be faced with something that demands their greatest concentration. The passages