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The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by his beloved Beatrice (whom he never spoke to, and had seen only once). While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatory, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most ecstatic mystic passages, in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey.
Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian.
Other works include De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), on vernacular literature, and the La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The book contains love poems in Tuscan, not a new thing; the vernacular had been used for lyric works before. But it also contains Dante's learned comments on his own work and these too are in the vernacular, instead of the Latin that was almost universally used.
Note: References to La divina commedia are as follows:
(Inferno, XV, 76) = (book, canto, verse)
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4 See also
Alighieri, Dante
Alighieri, Dante
Alighieri
Alighieri
Alighieri
Alighieri
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