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One hell of a trip

Will YeomanThe West Australian
The painting La commedia illumina Firenze by Domenico di Michelino, on the wall of Florence Cathedral.
Camera IconThe painting La commedia illumina Firenze by Domenico di Michelino, on the wall of Florence Cathedral. Credit: Supplied

This year sees the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, who was born in Florence in 1265. His most famous work is La divina commedia, or The Divine Comedy, a sprawling epic poem in three parts — Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise — which took Dante about 12 years to write. He finished it in 1320, the year before his death.

It’s called a comedy. However this account of Dante’s journey through hell and purgatory to get to heaven is anything but funny (the word had a slightly different meaning in Dante’s time; in this case, it simply denotes a work with a happy ending). Unless you’re talking about Dan Brown’s Dante-inspired 2013 novel Inferno. Now that’s pretty funny.

Most people never get past the spectacularly gory, scary and hugely entertaining first part, the Inferno — the present writer included. You could say it’s the ultimate trip from hell. The ultimate buddy road trip. The ultimate revenge comedy. Maybe even the ultimate bad trip. After all, there’s always the danger of getting too high on Dante’s hypnotic medieval Italian terza rima, a stanza and rhyme scheme which he actually invented.

After finding himself lost in a dark wood, Dante is approached by his guide, the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil, who must lead Dante through hell and purgatory if the latter has any hope of finding salvation. And so begins one of the great journeys, as the two poets travel first through each of the nine circles of hell, encountering many figures from history and Dante’s own past (both friends and enemies).

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“Here doggy... there’s a good dog...” A scene from Dante’s Inferno as illustrated by Gustave Dore.
Camera Icon“Here doggy... there’s a good dog...” A scene from Dante’s Inferno as illustrated by Gustave Dore. Credit: Supplied/Supplied

There are special circles with tortures specifically assigned to the lustful and the violent; to panderers and seducers, thieves, hypocrites and “counsellors of fraud”; and to, in Dante’s eyes, the very worst: those who betrayed their relatives, their country, their guests or their benefactors. Needless to say, this is where Judas ends up.

All are variously tormented by winds, rain, insects or demons with whips or swords, burnt, frozen, weighed down by boulders, roasted in burning tombs or frozen in ice, each according to the seriousness and nature of his or her sin.

I know what you’re thinking. I too would like to see quite a few people I know consigned to Dante’s hell. Most of them politicians. As for the sign above hell’s gate which famously reads “Abandon all hope you who enter here”, I can remember staying in quite a few hotels which should have had that written above their entrances.

In her often hilarious Travels with Myself and Another: five journeys from hell, journalist Martha Gellhorn writes:

“The C Class hotel was a three-storey cement box; my room was a cubbyhole with a full complement of dead flies, mashed mosquitoes on the walls and hairy dust balls drifting around the floor.”

Of course, the present pandemic and the concept of quarantine hotels have put everything into context. So much so that it’s easier for us to remember everything we loved about travel than to remember the things we hated about it. The things we don’t miss. Our own journeys through hell.

Dante’s Divine Comedy took as its inspiration Virgil’s Latin epic The Aeneid, which in turn took its inspiration from Homer’s The Odyssey. In our own times, Wheatbelt poet John Kinsella has placed himself firmly in the same tradition by writing Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography.

In Kinsella’s version, Florence becomes Perth, but much of the work is notionally set in the WA Wheatbelt, including in my own hometown of York — often a kind of hell, or purgatory, for those growing up there in the 1970s. It was then that I first encountered Dante’s Inferno, as a good prose translation in a cheap paperback.

Mementos of San Miniato al Monte, from Will Yeoman’s trip to Florence in 2000.
Camera IconMementos of San Miniato al Monte, from Will Yeoman’s trip to Florence in 2000. Credit: Will Yeoman/Supplied

Back in 2000, I also travelled to Dante’s birthplace of Florence — an obligatory pilgrimage — and visited the basilica of San Miniato al Monte, perched atop one of the highest points in Florence. It is mentioned in the purgatorio.

There will no doubt be many celebrations throughout the world this year in honour of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. But more importantly, in a time when travel for most of us is difficult, dangerous or impossible, it’s good to know there are great works of literature such as his Divine Comedy which can transport us to the outermost limits of the imagination. And to the depths of our own souls.

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