I - Author’s Biography:
Dante’s Inferno is written by Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet in the early 14th century. Not only a poet but a scholar and philosopher as well, Alighieri’s poetic trilogy defined and set standards to some of the finest work today. Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, the city of Renaissance and art, and was raised Roman Catholic (something thoroughly envisioned in his work). His mother passed a few years after his birth.
When Alighieri was twelve he was arranged to be married to a daughter of a family friend, but Dante had fallen in love with another by the name of Beatrice Portinari. Portinari would go on to be a key piece to the Divine Comedy. He described his love for her as ‘love at first sight’ and met her when she was just nine years old. Beatrice led to an unexpected death, which too influenced Alighieri’s writing and interest in philosophy immensely. Dante was considered a ‘world-class poet’ and was known for his involvement in politics, which led him to being exiled from Florence largely caused by the banishing of several rivals and causing chaos. These incidents led to the placement of certain people such as Pope Boniface in his own personal idea of hell.
Alighieri’s experiences and thoughts concerning his
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The are dressed in lustrous cloaks, but that inside are covered in heavy lead, representing the quote: “outward appearance shines brightly and passes for holiness, but under that show lies the terrible weight of his deceit,” much like their sins in life. Caiaphas, the Jewish priest who organized to crucifixion of Christ, is punished there, being stapled to a cross on the bottom floor of the pit, and being trampled by hypocrites, or bearing the weight of all hypocrites. This reveals that Alighieri believes that intellectual/emotional sins are more severe than physical