Durante degli Alighieri, or Dante, was born in Florence, Italy in CE 1265 in a city and country torn to shreds by political strife. Amid power struggles between Church & State, Guelphs & Ghibellines, Whites & Blacks, he wrote the Divina Commedia. The Divine Comedy describes the poet’s journey through the pit of Hell, the mount of Purgatory, and the spheres of Heaven. 

Daring to snub the aristocracy and write in the vernacular, Dante is revered as the father of the Italian language. He revealed the beauty of this devolved Latin in a new scheme known as terza rima, tercets of eleven syllables in which the first and third lines rhyme. The second line of one tercet rhymes with the first and third lines of the next tercet. For example, lines 67-72 of Inferno VIII (Sinclair translation):

Lo buon maestro disse: “Omai, figliulo,
s’appressa la citta c’ha nome Dite,
coi gravi cittadin, col grande stuolo.”
E io: “Maestro, gia le sue meschite
la entro certe nella valle cerno,
vermiglie come se di foco uscite [fossero].”

The good Master said: “Now, my son, the city
draws near which bears the name of Dis, with its
grave citizens and great garrison.”
And I said: “Master, already I make out dis-
tinctly its mosques there within the valley, red
as if they had come out of the fire.”

The Inferno, and the often-neglected Purgatorio and Paradiso, still provides the basic archetype for the Christian afterlife to millions of the faithful. Fundamentalists still assert that Hell and Satan dwell beneath the Earth, and that Heaven is a realm of the sky. Only recently has the Catholic Church doubted the existence of Purgatory and Limbo. Thanks to Dante, Tartarus, Elysium and Olympus live on, millennia after their civilization perished in flames.

Dante’s classical influences, in a language accessible to the masses, was the first of the catalysts leading to the Italian Renaissance less than two centuries later. His synthesis of pagan and Christian lore in the Divina Commedia tilled the soil to be planted by the flight of Greek scholarship from Constantinople in 1453. And the rest is history.