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Visit to Hell

Franziska Meier

More than the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy has shaped our idea of hell and paradise. How could a 700-year-old book become so popular, even though very few have read it? How could a 14th century book written in Italian, which even it’s contemporaries would only decipher with the help of commentaries, become a global cultural asset? And how does Dante's ruler of hell, Lucifer, get into Japanese manga? The novelist Franziska Meier follows the intricate history of the reception of this millennium book. In fact it’s fame is only matched by Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's dramas.

The success of the Divine Comedy has always been and is even today very improbable. Dante's poetry is basically untranslatable. Nevertheless, the Divina Commedia is now available even in the most remote languages. Scenes and images from the work, still entirely originating from medieval world views, especially the visit to hell, were repeatedly reinterpreted. Thus so many liberties were taken, that sometimes only small traces remained of the original. This Millennium Book gave Europe a blueprint.

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