The Poetics Of Color And Usury: Inferno, Canto XVII, Lines 46 - 78

Walking With Dante · Oct 10, 2021 · 32m

We've come to what Dantista Chivacci Leonardi calls "the most colorful" bits of Dante's INFERNO. We've come to the usurers, sitting on the brink of the seventh circle of violence, looking out over the eighth circle of fraud, the deeper parts of hell.This passage is stuffed with synecdoches. Let's talk about why that is and how the poetic bones of COMEDY itself are exposed.This passage is also often overlooked, a mere footnote, because of the beast of fraud that comes before it and after it and eats up so much attention.It's also over-interpreted. There's so much effort in the commentary to…