Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’ inspired by Dante Alighieri’s ‘La Divina Comedia’ (Part I)

When Manila Metropolitan Chair Tolentino was slighted by Dan Brown’s latest bestseller “Inferno”, I was curious why, so I immediately bought a copy. Then I realized that it wasn’t just a thriller but an enthralling tourist guide book of three major cities of the world: Florence and Venice, which I frequented as a scholar for two years in Italy and exotic Istanbul that inspired my husband Max and me to write about. Truly, it touched a sensitive cord in our Philippine society since it referred to the overpopulated, polluted, and criminally infested slum areas of Metro Manila.

Dan Brown’s peek at the Philippines

Reading through the 461 pages of the book was exceptionally easy since the 104 chapters were full of suspense but exasperating since I could not see any mention of the Philippines until page 351. The additional three pages up to p. 354, recounted the story when Sienna Brooks, a depressive genius sought therapy by joining a humanitarian group to stay for a month-long trip in the Philippines.

An attempted gang rape in a shanty town, quote: “a city made of pieces of corrugated metal and cardboard propped up and held together. All around her the wails of crying babies and the stench of human excrement hung in the air. I’VE RUN THROUGH HELL….” Sienna said.

Sienna left the Philippines at once, without even saying goodbye to the group. Quote: “Her panic attack in the crowded streets of Manila had sparked in Sienna, a deep concern about overcrowding and world population. It was then that she discovered the writings of Bertrand Zobrist, a genetic engineer, who had proposed very progressive theories about world population.”

An outline of ‘The Inferno’

The publication of his groundbreaking novels The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, and Angels & Demons, has made Dan Brown an international bestselling sensation. Styled as thrillers, his novels have captivated and fascinated millions of people around the world. His amazing new novel Inferno enthralls the readers through a detailed cultural tour of the famous historical landmarks of Florence, Venice and Istanbul, Turkey, as well as their hidden secret chambers and basements unknown to tourists.

Jason Kaufman, his editor, summarizes the storyline with the main characters led by Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of history, an exceptionally intellectual young woman, Sienna Brooks, and Dr. Bertrand Zobrist, a genius who saw the collapse of the human race in the future, unless a plague like the Black Death can arrest the continuous population explosion.

His synopsis read: “Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in the middle of the night. Disoriented and suffering from a head wound, he recalls nothing of the last thirty-six hours, including how he got there… or the origin of the macabre object that his doctors discover hidden in his belongings.

“Langdon’s world soon erupts into chaos, and he finds himself on the run in Florence with a stoic young woman, Sienna Brooks, whose clever maneuvering saves his life. Langdon quickly realizes that he is in possession of a series of disturbing codes created by a brilliant scientist – a genius whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written – Dante Alighieri’s dark epic poem The Inferno.

“Racing through such timeless location as the Palazzo Vecchio, the Boboli Gardens, and the Duomo, Langdon and Brooks discover a network of hidden passageways and ancient secrets, as well as a terrifying new scientific paradigm that will be used either to vastly improve the quality of life on earth… or to devastate it.”

Dante Alighieri of Florence in the 13th century Renaissance Era

In 1265, one year during the Second Republic, Dante was born in Florence. From the Comedy, we learned that one of his great –grandfathers, Cacciaguida was knighted by the emperor Conrad III, and may have died in the second Crusade in the Holy Land. Alighieri were certainly not among the most prominent citizens of Florence, some of them were sufficiently active politically to have suffered exile. His father Alighiero, seems to have been a lender and money changer, who accumulated fairly substantial land holdings.

Florence network of schools was to become a significant civic achievement in the fourteenth century. But little is know of Dante’s own early education. But however limited was the formal frame of his early studies, and whether or not he had any formal frame at all, he was clearly an intense self-teacher (with reference to poetry, he declares that he had learned “by himself the art of speaking words in rhyme: Vita Nuova III,9)

Dante’s early poetry falls into the tradition of love poetry that passed from the Provencal to such Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s friend and mentor. Unquestionably, the major event in Dante’s youth was, or became his love for Beatrice. She is the daughter of Folco Portinari, a close neighbor of the Alighieri; married to Simone di Bardi. She died at an early age in 1290, when Dante was 25. Dante tells us that he first saw Beatrice, and immediately felt the force of love for her when he was almost nine, and she some eight months younger.

Around 1285, he married Gemma Donati. With her, Dante had at least three children: Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia. (Pietro was to become one of the most lucid commentators we have on the Comedy.) Dante was a searcher for final meanings; he read the events that followed his boyhood vision of Beatrice, including the event of her very early death as an invitation to his spiritual transformation. Dante foreshadowed this transformation in the tale of his love, the Vita Nuova, New life, the autobiographical work in poetry and prose that he compiled in 1293-1294, a few years after the death of his beloved. He fully embodied this transformation in the Comedy, where Beatrice is the woman who, in the first canto of the Inferno, sends Virgil to rescue the straying Dante from the “shadowed forest” of fear and terror, and who will later lead Dante to the vision of Paradise.

Dante in between the war of papal states and the Roman Empire

After death of Beatrice, Dante entered, belatedly but voraciously, a period of philosophic study. His motives were both the need for consolation and the restless, urban, unecclesiastical curiosity that characterized one who was becoming the most complete intellectual of his time. By the 1290s, Dante could have drawn on three philosophical–theological schools in Florence: the schools of the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Franciscans.

Dante was drawn into a conspicuous role in attempting to thwart the ambitions of Pope Boniface VIII. Boniface was the most formidable and determined figure in Italian politics in the years of his pontificate, 1294-1303. For his attempt to thwart Boniface, Dante was to pay a heavy price. On January 27, 1302, he was condemned – in absentia to two years of exile, to perpetual exclusion from public office, and to the payment of a ruinous fine of five thousand florins within three days.

In his lengthy exile he was welcomed by various noble houses all over Italy. In 1303 or 1304, Dante was at the court of Scaligers in Verona, and then he may have spent time in Treviso, Padua, Venice, Bologna, and Reggio Emilia. In 1306, he was in Lunigiana as the guest of the Malaspina family; they charged him with handling peace negotiations with the bishop of Luni. Early and late in his exile, he was in the Casentino, and in 1308, he was in Lucca. Boccaccio and others also assign to him a stay in Paris. For whatever Dante went in his exile, he saw an Italy rent by internal wars. The true political unity of the Holy Roman Empire was merely a fiction by now, but it was still a fiction that had enormous motivating force as political idea, especially for Dante.

Compiling La Divina Comedia during his lengthy exile

in exile he wrote his Convivio, or Banquet, a kind of poetic compendium of medieval philosophy, as well as a political treatise, Monarchia. He begun his Comedy (later to be called the Divine Comedy and consisting of three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso), around 1307-1308.

In Verona, at the court of Cangrande della Scala, Dante completed the final stages of his work on the Inferno and Purgatorio. In 1319-1320, the scholar Giovanni del Virgilio invited Dante to Bologna to be crowned there as poet. Dante declined the invitation. He explained that he hoped that with the completion of Paradiso he might be crowned on the banks of his “native Arno” if he “should ever return there.”

In 1321, possibly on a return voyage from an ambassadorial mission to Venice that he had undertaken at the request of Guido da Polenta, Dante fell ill. He died in Ravenna, probably in the night between the thirteenth and fourteenth of September. The complete Paradiso was made public posthumously.

(Part II- Burning In Our “Inferno”, Oh God Have Mercy)

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