Purgatorio — The Divine Comedy, Part II

The Mountain

After Inferno’s descent through the circles of Hell, the Purgatorio ascends. Dante and Virgil emerge on the shore of a mountain island in the Southern Hemisphere — the mountain of Purgatory, its terraces corresponding to the seven deadly sins. The souls here suffer but are not damned: they are atoning, becoming, approaching.

The difference in atmosphere from Inferno is immediate. The souls in Purgatory are capable of gratitude, of affection, of genuine conversation. The meeting in Canto II with the musician Casella — Dante’s friend, who sings a love song so beautifully that all the souls stop their climbing to listen, until Cato rebukes them — establishes the canticle’s tone of longing and beauty.

The Handoff

Purgatorio manages one of the poem’s structural and emotional masterstrokes: Virgil’s gradual ceding of authority. In Inferno, Virgil knows everything. On the mountain, he begins to defer — to other souls, to Dante’s own growing understanding, and finally, at the Earthly Paradise, to Beatrice herself, who takes over as guide for Paradise.

A Mountain Built on Moral Architecture

The structure of Purgatory is one of Dante’s most original inventions. Where Hell was a funnel descending toward Satan, the mountain rises in seven terraces, each devoted to purging one of the seven capital sins, arranged by the logic of misdirected love: pride, envy, and wrath at the bottom (love perverted toward a neighbour’s harm), sloth in the middle (love deficient), and avarice, gluttony, and lust near the summit (love excessive toward lesser goods). The souls do not merely wait out a sentence; they perform penances that are precise inversions of their sins — the proud bent double under stones, the gluttonous starving before fruit they cannot reach, the envious with their eyes sewn shut. This is Dante’s theology made spatial: virtue is not imposed from outside but relearned through experience, and the climb up the mountain is the soul’s re-education in how to love rightly. It is also why the second canticle feels so much more humane than the first. These souls are going somewhere.

The Return of Beatrice

The emotional summit of the canticle arrives not at the top of the mountain but in the Earthly Paradise at its peak, where Virgil — the voice of human reason, who has guided Dante since the dark wood of Canto I of Inferno — silently disappears, and Beatrice arrives in his place. Dante’s reunion with the woman who has been his muse and the impetus for the entire journey is not the tender embrace a reader might expect. Beatrice reproaches him, sternly and at length, for the moral wandering of his life after her death, reducing the pilgrim to tears and confession. The scene is startling in its intimacy: it transforms the cosmic poem, for a moment, into something almost autobiographical, the reckoning of a man with his own failures. Only after this purgation of his personal guilt — a kind of last terrace reserved for Dante alone — is he made ready to drink from the rivers Lethe and Eunoe and rise toward Paradise.

Dante and the Making of a Language

It is worth remembering what Dante was doing simply by writing the Commedia in Italian rather than Latin. In the early fourteenth century, serious philosophical and theological work was expected in Latin; the vernacular was for love lyrics and popular tales. By choosing the Tuscan dialect of his native Florence — from which he had been exiled, never to return — Dante effectively willed a national literature into being, and the language he forged became the foundation of modern Italian. Purgatorio, with its long passages of doctrinal exposition rendered in supple, musical terza rima, demonstrates that the vernacular could carry the full weight of the era’s intellectual ambition. The poet’s political bitterness over his exile, his loyalties and grudges, and his vision of a corrupt Church and fractured Italy all run beneath the surface of the climb.

How to Approach It

Purgatorio rewards readers most when taken as the middle movement of a single work rather than a standalone poem. Those who have read Inferno will recognize how deliberately the second canticle answers the first: where Hell offered fixed, theatrical sinners frozen in their defining vice, Purgatory offers souls in motion, and the muted drama is the point. A good annotated translation is close to essential, since the terraces presuppose a Scholastic moral framework most modern readers will not carry in their heads, and the historical and political references are dense. Read it slowly, canto by canto, and let the change in register from Inferno register fully — the gratitude of the souls, the recurring images of dawn and song, the sense of hope that the first canticle so pointedly withholds. For readers who found Inferno spectacular but cold, Purgatorio is often the canticle that makes the whole Commedia feel alive.

The Artists on the Mountain

One of the quiet pleasures of Purgatorio is its preoccupation with art and the artists who make it — a self-aware theme for a poet writing the most ambitious work of his century. On the terrace of the proud, Dante studies carved reliefs of such lifelike beauty that they seem to speak, illustrations of humility that double as a meditation on whether art itself can be a form of vanity. He encounters the illuminator Oderisi da Gubbio, who delivers a famous lesson on the fleetingness of artistic fame: one painter eclipses another, one poet supplants the last, and worldly renown is “no more than a breath of wind.” That Dante places this warning in the mouth of a fellow artist, on the terrace where his own besetting sin of pride is purged, is one of the poem’s most personal gestures. Elsewhere he meets the poet Statius, whose secret conversion to Christianity Dante imagines was sparked by reading Virgil — a touching fiction in which the pagan master unknowingly saves a soul he himself can never reach. These encounters knit together Dante’s deepest concerns: the moral seriousness of making things, the humility art ought to teach, and the bittersweet limits of even the greatest human achievement.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The most human of the three canticles — souls in the process of becoming, rendered with tenderness and lyric beauty.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Dante Alighieri
• Inferno by Dante Alighieri — Full Review
• Paradiso by Dante Alighieri — Full Review