The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy, (in Italian "Comedia" or "Commedia", later christened "Divina" by Giovanni Boccaccio), written by Dante Alighieri between 1307 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the greatest epic poem of Italian literature[?], and one of the greatest of world literature.

It is composed of three canticas, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise), composed respectively of 34, 33, and 33 cantos. The verse scheme used, terza rima, is the hendecasyllable, with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC...

The poet tells in the first person his travel through the three realms of the dead, lasting a week during the spring of 1300.

External links to the text

• HTML version of the Text from the ELF project (Original Italian, and two English translations)
• http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy
• The Italian text can be freely downloaded from http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/a/alighieri/index.htm
• An English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is available at the Project Gutenberg at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1004.

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The Divine Comedy is also the name of a pop band fronted by Neil Hannon. They wrote and played the theme music for the television comedy series Father Ted.