ABSTRACT
Dante’s Comedy is the tale of his voyage in the afterworld, from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven. Dante believed that his mission, like that of the biblical prophets, was to offer his testimony to all Christians, showing them the way to restore moral and political order, and to reach salvation, the perfect fulfillment of human life. The generic nature of the Comedy goes far beyond its classical and medieval models: the Latin visions, the vernacular poems, the Latin epics, the philosophical treatises. Dante synthesizes the whole culture of his time, filtering it through his own biographical, political, and literary experience. His message of salvation comes across the more strongly since it is personal as well as universal. All of these levels of meaning, transmitted by a linguistic and literary construction without precedent, explain the success of the Comedy in the Middle Ages. But what explains its success in other ages, including the present one, is the deeply human nature of Dante’s representation. By describing the “status of souls after-death”, Dante describes the world of the living, a great representation of humanity, with its passions, dilemmas, and errors.
