Facts about Cantos of Dante

1. 05

   Virgil, the ancient Roman poet of the Aeneid, guides Dante through the cantos of Hell and Purgatory before Beatrice takes over as guide in Paradise.

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2. 04

   In the Inferno, Canto 1 serves as a prologue to the entire Comedy, meaning the first canticle effectively contains 34 cantos rather than the standard 33.

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3. 03

   Dante's cantos vary in length, with Inferno's cantos averaging around 136 lines each, giving the entire Comedy roughly 14,000 lines of verse.

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4. 02

   Each canto in Dante's Divine Comedy is written in terza rima, an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme Dante himself pioneered in Italian literature.

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5. 01

   The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is divided into 100 cantos total, with 34 in Inferno and 33 each in Purgatorio and Paradiso.

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