Dante's Divine Comedy, Day 1

So, today I didn't get as far down the reading list as I'd have liked to.  Apparently it takes longer to read "serious literature" books than it does to read "silly fiction" books.  Who'd've thought?  So I may get less of my summer reading list done than I'd really like to.  Oh well.  I'll keep trying, and there's always next summer!

Anyways, I got about 50 pages into Dante's Divine Comedy today.  To give you a little background, Dante was born in Florence in 1265 and was exiled from his city in around 1301 for political reasons.  He was married to a woman named Gemma but never wrote any poetry about her; instead, he wrote to/about his "courtly love" Beatrice, with whom he fell in love at first sight at age 18.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, originally named Commedia, there are three sections (side note: Dante was one of the first, and definitely the greatest, Italian poets to write in Italian).  The story is about Dante, at age 35, being led through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise by the Roman poet Virgil.  The first section, part of which I read today, is Hell.  Today Dante went through the first seven circles of hell.  I won't summarize it, because I'm not entirely certain I remember all of it, but I will point out some points that confused me.

Although Dante seems to be coming at all of this from a Catholic angle,
1. He is being led by a Roman poet through hell, purgatory, and paradise (rather than by an angel or saint)
2. There are many Greek mythical characters in this story that belong in the Greek underworld, not the Christian hell.  Charon, Cerberus, Plutus, etc.
3. In each circle of hell, Dante meets people he knows/knows of.  Many of them are cardinals, popes, or other religious figures.
4. He uses a character named Beatrice as the angel who sets up this whole tour through the afterlife thing.

So I'm a teensy bit confused about where he's coming from.

Other than that, it's very interesting.  After I got a headache trying to read it in verse, I started just connecting the sentences without any reference to the lines.  Here's an example of how it's written:

"The mountains and the hills crumbled to the earth, slowly collapsing to the ground"

would be written

"The mountains and the hills
Crumbled to the earth
Slowly collapsing
to the ground"

And that's with modern grammar and word-placement.  I finally figured out how to read it like the former sentence, not the latter.

Also, I was very excited to find the source of the famous line "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," which is written on the gates of hell, according to Dante.


 In other news, tonight I am baking chocolate loaf cake, but I substituted 1 1/3 cup all-purpose flour for the spelt flour, 3.5 oz. of 85% cocoa plus 1/8 cup semisweet chocolate chips for the bittersweet chocolate, and light brown sugar for the dark Muscovado sugar.  Mmmm...  can't wait till it gets out of the oven.


<3
Eliza