Inferno

Through me the way to the city of woe, through me the way to everlasting pain, through me the way to the lost... Abandon all hope, you who enter here. (Inferno: III, 1-9)

For Dante, Hell is depicted as a conical pit located beneath Jerusalem, created when Lucifer was hurled to earth from Heaven, spiraling down in nine concentric circles. These represent sins of increasing magnitude (lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery), and are populated by historical, literary and mythological figures. Each circle is rife with the visceral sounds, smells and sights of eternal punishment.

Dante’s description of the Inferno is indebted to many sources, and draws just as heavily on Greco-Roman traditions as Christian ones – little surprise, perhaps given Dante’s love of Virgil’s Aeneid, which includes a sojourn in the underworld, and with which the Inferno shares several characters and places. Prominent features of Dante's Hell include Limbo (a place outlined in Catholic doctrine, but which bears a notable similarity to Asphodel) rivers Acheron, Phlegethon, and Styx, the city of Dis (the home of demon-kind), the Wood of the Suicides, and the icy expanse of Cocytus.

Dante’s Inferno offers an illustration of contrapasso: a form of poetic justice drawn from theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. Here, punishments are an ironic inversion of the crime committed. Murderers are condemned to stand in a river of boiling blood, for example; hypocrites must walk forever in robes that glitter like gold on the outside, but beneath are weighted with lead. Because the residents of Hell have sinned unrepentantly, or believe their acts were justified, their punishments represent a righting of the natural order. This does not just extend to humanity: at the lowest point of Hell, farthest from God’s light, which he rejected, Lucifer is imprisoned in a lake of ice.

So vividly does Dante describe the underworld – even going so far as to ascribe exact dimensions to the lower regions of Hell, that artists, cartographers and mathematicians were quick to depict, and then to debate, the nature of the Inferno as he portrayed it. This preoccupied some of Italy’s greatest minds: in 1588 a young Galileo Galilei was commissioned to deliver two lectures On the Shape, Location and Size of Dante’s Inferno, which analysed it in scientific detail the mass and architectural construction of Hell.