The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
About this ebook
The Divine Comedy (or Divina Commedia) is an epic-length narrative poem, written between 1308 and 1320 in the vernacular Tuscan of the era, that is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and a foundational work of the literary canon.
The poem traces the narrator's journey through the afterlife -- visiting first hell, then purgatory, and then paradise -- and presents an imaginative vision of the afterlife that provides great insight into the medieval Catholic worldview. Longfellow's verse translation was originally published in 1867 and is considered to be a literary masterpiece in its own right.
About the author
Dante Alighieri (c.1265 – 1321), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher, most famous for his Divine Comedy, which is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante's literary output is largely responsible for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, making it more accessible to the larger public and helping establishing the modern-day standardized Italian language. His depictions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in the Divine Comedy were also enduringly influential on the Western literary and artistic imagination, heavily influencing future English-language writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton, and Italians like Petrarch and Boccaccio.
