Micah's Reviews > Circles of Hell

After doing all of Dante about a year ago, this small collection of randomly pulled Cantos left me itching for the whole thing again. I was more impressed by Dante’s imagining of the Paradiso and Purgatorio than his Inferno, but it seems that the unique tortures are the most fascinating for most people.

Dante’s Commedia makes good reading for anyone who wants to understand the historical evolution about ideas of heaven and hell. Many of our ideas about eternal torture and red devils with wings and pointy tails comes from or was concreted in history by Dante.

This somewhat random collection doesn’t do much justice to the whole work, but it might give you a good idea of whether you can appreciate the whole work. I find his interactions with damned people famous in his own context fascinating, but his creative conceptions of purgatory and heaven are too often overlooked.