dante

In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, it's the part set in hell that's been most memorable.

Both are Great artists, we all need to study more before judge or even comment about Dante and Leopardi.

My first exposure to Dante was John Ciardi's version in college for a philosophy class I took.

Mind that Dante invented the language that italians speak.

> Dante was a poetic genius that created an entire language from scratch and pushed it in incredible directions.

My point is they are both so bad that saying one is really really bad is like Dante discussing why the third circle of Hell isn't as bad as the fourth.

The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...

It's a point I happen to agree with, and regardless of whether or not you think Dante would create a special place in hell for rich guys who provide political cover for torturers, it does undermine to some extent the premise of of pg's article.

One of the parts of The Divine Comedy I find interesting is that it is an extremely effective demonstration to point people who still believe the hard-to-kill myth that the idea of a round Earth was unknown to Europeans before Columbus to, because of the sheer level of detail Dante goes into about it.

Dante was a poetic genius that created an entire language from scratch and pushed it in incredible directions.

To put this into perspective, Chaucer was two generations after Dante, and his writings are _barely_ comprehensible by layreaders.

Such is the influence of Dante's literary language on the language of ordinary Italians today.