L'inferno, canti 1-6 di Dante Alighieri

The first thing I noticed was naturally the Italian text. Dante wrote L'inferno originally in italiano volgare, or the form of archaic Italian spoken and understood by the masses. italian is largely based on the Tuscan dialect of Latin, and was in part founded by Dante himself because of his insistance on writing in vernacular rather than in Medeival or Classical Latin like those before him (Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Petrarch were the first to write in archaic Italian, in order for their works to be understood by the masses who didn't know Latin). Reading the original Italian, I can understand words here and there, and I feel like I should be able to understand all of it, but I cannot understand it entirely since my native language is English.

Dante has a power of descriptiveness. He has a way of telling you something, without being direct, which in turn stimulates the mind to think. For example, in the beginning of the first canto, he does not say that Virgil as a ghost. Virgil simply states that he is "not a man, [he] was formerly a man" (line 67). Also, Dante describes his journey as if he had lived it firsthand, ripe with emotions that one would be feeling if travelling to Hell.

Virgil to me represents an Italian author's acknoledgement and love for the glory of the Roman Empire and classical antiquity while Beatrice represents the Roman Catholic Church, another part of an italian's life.

On a translation note, in modern Italian, dolore means pain. But in the context of Dante, it means sorrow. Also, primo means first, but here it means primal. Naturally, i am inclined towards the translation aspects of the Inferno. But one could easily say that God was first (il primo) and primal, and those in Hell are eternally in pain (il dolore) and sorrow.

Medieval and Renaissance Italians loved the classical antiquity (l'antichità classica). They seemed to dwell in the past rather than move forward. But nonetheless, their work is amazing. The fact that Dante uses Charon and the River Styx in his Inferno shows his appreciation for the Greek and Roman mythology that preceeded him. Charon, in fact, is Greek, not Roman.