Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont for more than thirty years. He is the author of books on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western Tradition as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical music. He currently is working on a translation of Dante's Purgatorio for Focus Publishing.

 From the Introduction                               

The appeal of Dante also quickly spread to the medium of painting and, with the introduction of printing, into many annotated and illustrated editions. In the visual arts, Signorelli’s New Chapel at the cathedral in Orvieto, Botticelli’s hundred drawing sequence illustrating the poem, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican are three of the most prominent examples of Dante’s fame and influence. After a waning of interest in Dante in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, fascination with the poet and the poem increased in the early Romantic period and has continued unabated ever since. In recent years numerous editions, translations, commentaries, scholarly studies, and series of illustrations have appeared in an impressive stream. To this day Dante remains one of the towering figures of world literature.

What accounts for the immediate and enduring appeal of Dante’s poem? Dante tells the story of the journey of an endangered pilgrim through the known cosmos and the realms of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise to allow him to see the spectrum of human reality and the glory of divine origins that lead to salvation. Dante makes the pilgrim a version of himself and creates two major voices: the voice of the pilgrim experiencing the journey for the first time, and the voice of the narrator shaping and retelling the journey. The fate of the individual pilgrim has its own urgency in the question of his knowledge, belief, and fate, but as the poem indicates in its opening line, the single pilgrim’s fate is parallel to all of human experience:

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