The first and best-loved part of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Inferno charts the poet Dante’s excursion around the nine circles of Hell. This undisputable milestone of Western literature, originally written in Italian vernacular instead of Latin, is filled with fascinating, poetic and humane revelations about sin, regret, redemption and the depths of human despair.
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141195872
Number of pages: 576
Weight: 691 g
Dimensions: 206 x 136 x 35 mm
[Coralie Bickford-Smith's] recent work for Penguin Classics is...nothing short of glorious - Anna Cole Co.
THE DIVINE POETWith Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri forms the diptych of the greatest literary figures ever to grace humanity. T.S. Eliot said: "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is... More
The philosophy mixed with satire and critique of Catholicism and its leaders, most of all the reasoning and sympathy that most people sinned because the systems in power were so corrupt there were little other choice... More
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