The poet Dante Aligheri’s “Commedia” — it picked up “Divine” somewhere along the way — may seem ... For Dante, Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise were not metaphors but sites on a map. His world was one ...

It's a lesser known work, much slimmer and more digestible than The Divine Comedy. It depicts a young Dante falling in love with his muse, Beatrice, who dies in the middle of the book. Sponsor ...

This applies nicely to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Its garden is the poem’s otherworld—based on the ancient geocentric cosmos and Christian eschatology—and its toads are Dante’s ...