The Divine Comedy: Inferno

The first of the three parts 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 structurally matched to it. Written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin — one of the decisions that made Italian a literary language — and populated with Dante’s own contemporaries, so the poem doubles as a settling of Florentine political accounts.

Why it’s on the list: UATX gives it a course of its own — “Dante, Inferno” is the only course on the Fall 2025 list assigned a single text, which is the curator’s way of saying this one is read slowly and completely rather than excerpted.

Where I saw it: The University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, 65 Texts Our Students Are Reading, published November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

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.