The Divine Comedy: Inferno
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The Divine Comedy: Inferno
| Full title | The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno |
|---|---|
| Author | Dante Alighieri |
| Published | 1472 |
| Recommended | 2 times |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | The first part of Dante’s Commedia: thirty-four cantos in which the poet, guided by Virgil, descends through nine circles of Hell, each sin given a punishment matched to it — written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, and populated with Dante’s own contemporaries, so it doubles as a settling of Florentine political accounts. |
The Divine Comedy: Inferno
Where I heard about it
- University of Austin — given a course of its own, Dante, Inferno — the only course on its Fall 2025 reading list assigned a single text, to be read slowly and completely rather than excerpted. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.
- @athenaeumbc — in a stack of ~35 old books photographed by Athenaeum Book Club (October 2026) under the line “One of the hidden benefits of reading old books is that they rescue you from the arrogance of the present.” The full stack is listed on One of the hidden benefits… (tweet).
About this edition
Composed c. 1308–1320; first printed at Foligno in 1472. Writing it in Tuscan was one of the decisions that made Italian a literary language.
Connections
- UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
- Dante — the wiki’s page on the poet, where Will Durant puts the Divine Comedy in his “Hundred Best Books” program.
- Christianity — the poem’s cosmology and its moral scheme.
- Literature — part of the Western canon this list is built around.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.