Circle Seven: Round Three In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy

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Inferno is the beginning part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Although given only Canto’s XIV, XV and XVI for reference, it can be understood as if Dante was recounting his travel through the circles of Hell which were a part of Earth itself. The circle presented in these three Cantos is called “Circle Seven: Round Three” or perhaps better referred to as “The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art” (Dante, Inferno, Canto XIV). In this circle, Dante and the poet Virgil travel from the previous circle into the next one called the “Great Plain of Burning Sand, upon which there descends an eternal slow Rain of Fire” (Dante, Inferno, Canto XIV). This circle is composed of “three classes of sinners suffering differing degrees of exposure to the …show more content…
Because we are not told the nature of the sin, it can be assumed that Dante simply placed him in this Hell for a reason only Dante believed. Another example comes from within the introduction to Canto XVI, in which we are told that Dante sees a group of souls running towards him. These souls are of three men “whose policies and personalities Dante admired.” (Dante, Inferno, Canto XVI). Those men being “Jacopo Rustigucci, Guido Guerra, and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi…” and his statement about his admiration for them is confusing because we are not told for what reasons Dante has placed them in this circle of Hell (Dante, Inferno, Canto XVI, lines 37, 41, 44). While Rustigucci claims that it was his wife who damned him to the burning plain, the footnote state that “no details of his life are known”, thus it could be as if Dante placed him there of his own personal accord (Dante, Inferno, Canto XVI, footnote 44). Likewise, the charges of sodomy against the latter two men is bewildering because “… considering the prominence of Guido… Dante is the only writer to label him a sodomite” and towards Aldobrandi, “this is another case in which Dante is the only writer to bring the charge of