We enter Inferno, Canto XX, with the most self-conscious opening of any canto in all of COMEDY—and then we meet the fortune tellers, the people who divine the future . . . you know, like Dante, whose whole poem is about telling the future of what’s going to happen to you after you take your last breath.

An overview of Inferno, Canto XIX: its structure, its engineering, its successes, its range, and its one glaring failure. This episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE is meant to be a summary of the previous episodes on this canto of Dante’s INFERNO. It’s a wider and wider vision of this incredibly complex canto.

Our pilgrim, Dante, finishes his righteous rage over the popes in hell and lands right in Virgil’s arms. This last embrace may show us what Dante the poet thinks Comedy is all about. And our poet can’t help but give one last, passing slap to those popes down in their holes.

Dante the pilgrim goes on a rant against Pope Nicholas III, stuck upside-down in a hole in the 3rd evil pouch of the 8th circle of INFERNO, the landscape of fraud. Thick with Biblical and historical allusions, as well as call-backs to other parts of INFERNO, this screed is difficult, illusive, and even incoherent. What else would you expect if you think the popes are bringing on the apocalypse?

Pope Nicholas III reveals himself, confesses his sins to Dante, and anticipates the arrival of another pope, Clement V, who took the papacy to Avignon. This passage is fraught with periphrasis and Biblical allusions. But it also helped expose my own unexamined assumptions about COMEDY as a whole. Dante is always one step ahead of us. Or maybe several.

Popes in hell! How can this be possible? Also, how can this be so funny? And so beautifully constructed! Canto XIX of INFERNO is an amazing feat of poetic craft, tonality, artistry, and even a glimpse into the pilgrim’s (and the poet’s!) interior space. There’s not much better writing in INFERNO. Dante is at the top of his game!

Dante and Virgil descend into the third evil pouch. It seems like a fairly straightforward narrative passage. But this is Dante and his COMEDY! Interpretive questions abound. What’s Virgil’s role in the third of the malebolge in the 8th circle of hell? Why does Dante need Virgil for this descent? And why does Dante need to go down into this pouch in the first place?

Amid the condemnations of the church, just after a prefatory poem and before the denunciations get into full swing, the pilgrim Dante feels the need to make a confession to us, the readers. And in doing so, he establishes a priestly role for his reader and turns the act of interpreting his text into a sacramental activity, all while loading up on Christian imagery in every direction.

The opening proem (a prefatory poem) to Inferno, Canto XIX. We change gears dramatically from Canto XVIII. We can see the tonal shift while still understanding that the question of pimps, prostitutes, seducers, flatterers, and metamorphosis in Canto XVIII are still with us here, at the beginning of the canto about the damned popes.

Two flatterers, covered with human excrement in the second evil pouch of the eighth circle of hell, the circle of fraud. This passage would be quite straightforward except for two weird things: both of the damned are garbled, one by history and one by literary textuality. Is this garbling intentional in the circle of the flatterers? Or is our “divine” poet as fallible as the rest of us?

Entering the second of the evil pouches of fraud in the eighth circle of hell! Dante and Virgil are crossing along the spiny ridge to see a moldy pit filled with the muck from human privies. This passage is without a doubt the most disgusting in COMEDY—at least, so far. And how could it be otherwise? The sins are getting more human. So the language is getting coarser.

Virgil takes over—and becomes enamored with Jason, one of the seducers in the first evil pouch of the eighth circle of hell. Is Virgil overcome? Is he a reliable guide? Or is Jason with Hypsipyle and Medea just a little too much like Virgil’s Aeneas and Dido?

Pimps and fraud: what do they have in common? They both attempt to turn the good things into the world into something foul for the sake of money. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore the damned in the first of the evil pouches, the “Malebolge” of the eighth circle of Dante’s INFERNO.

Our first old-school demons! But more than that, a strange passage that may have some garbled details (intentionally so or not?). And that has a historical analogy about Pope Boniface VIII’s Jubilee Year of 1300 that may be more snark than sanctified imagery.

Welcome to the Eighth Circle of hell, the biggest single landscape in all of INFERNO: the circle of fraud. Our poet opens this circle in a whole new direction: an objective point of view that fuses an inverted (or perverted) castle with a spiderweb to illustrate what fraud does to human society. But maybe more is going on here? Is the poem becoming more self-conscious? Or just more fraudulent?

A look back over the seventh circle of INFERNO—that is, over Cantos XII through XVII. We’ve been among the violent for almost forty episodes of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE. What structural and thematic devices does Dante use to unify these cantos? And what are some of the unanswered questions?

Geryon’s flight: an imaginative tour de force. But there’s more here. How can this unnatural act of flying be described in the middle of a canto about those who sin against art, the usurers. Is the poet hedging his bets? Or winking at us from behind the text? Either way, he offers us tragic examples of overreach in a canto in which he imagines flight that ends with a minor comedic ending halfway through INFERNO.

Our beast of fraud is named: Geryon! Except doing so just makes things more confusing. Or more modern. Because this passage shows off the poet Dante as a forerunner of modern narrative in so many ways. Dante truly stands in the gap between the ancient and modern worlds. He’s not medieval. He’s transitional!

The usurers, out on the precipice of the seventh circle of hell, the end of the violent, overlooking the fraudulent far below. There are so many gaps and open spaces in this, the most colorful moment in Dante’s INFERNO. And so many questions, mostly because the very bones of the masterpiece’s poetic technique are being exposed.

Classical poetry has to negotiate with fraud to complete the journey to hell, so the modern pilgrim is sent off on his own at the lip of violence. There’s so much at stake for the poetics, structure, and symbolism in this strange passage from INFERNO, Canto XVII.