Status Updates From Inferno Decoded

Brunelleschi’s interest in the city, and curiosity about the past, was something new for those times. He and Donatello spent so many hours exploring the ancient ruins, and unearthing fallen masonry and broken statues, that they gained a nefarious reputation as treasure hunters or worse–practitioners of geomancy, one of magic’s seven forbidden arts–in an age when it was considered an ill omen to uncover pagan

Satan is fixed in the ice where he flaps his great wings as if to escape, but only creates the freezing wind felt throughout the Ninth Circle which more surely freezes Satan in place. In a parody of the Trinity, Satan has three faces. In each mouth he grips a sinner whom he tears apart: Judas Iscariot at the centre, and Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar, on either side.

Dante and Virgil arrive at the River Acheron, which circles the rim of Hell, before descending deeper, but the monstrous boat Charon refuses to ferry Dante across because he is not dead. Virgil forces Charon to take them, but Dante passes out in terror and does not awake until he reaches the other side.

Dante’s revolution was to write the original first-person fiction. Instantly that turns his epic into an inquiry, and gives it a set of eyes that present us with a live feed from the moment he begins his journey on the night before Good Friday 1300. He ventures first into Hell, then up through Purgatory, and eventually, on the Wednesday after Easter, into Paradise. Dante is a master of images,dramatic and fantastic

‘The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis’. Although the epigraph offers no source, those words are described in chapter 38 as ‘a famous quote derived from the work of Dante Alighieri’.
Dante never said any such thing. The quote is in fact derived from a remark by President John F Kennedy