Does anyone believe The Divine Comedy/Dantes Inferno is based on something true?
1) The Inferno is merely the first of 3 parts of the Divine Comedy. Books 2 & 3 are the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, respectively. 2) A great many things and people that he wrote about in all three books were true (e.g., Brutus, Vergil, Beatrice, and many others were all real people, and many of the deeds, faults, and virtues he attributes them are certainly historical), the many allusions and metaphors he makes to events and people in his own time are true in the sense that what they alluded to was real/historical … and of course Heaven, Hell, Satan, Christ, and God are all real and Christianity is true, even though Dante’s representation of these was often off, and often considerably so. . Also, it’s certainly true that the earth is round, that different stars are visible from the southern hemisphere, and that the time (in relation to local apparent noon) is different in different longitudes. All the stars and constellations he mentions are real, and he has them all in the right pl
