Dante encounters the souls of lustful lovers in the second circle of Hell, including Francesca da Rimini. She tells Dante how she fell in love with her husband's brother Paolo while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Their forbidden love led to both of their deaths, and they are doomed to spend eternity together in Hell. Dante is moved by Francesca's tale of tragic love that she could not control. This canto explores the nature of sin, punishment, and redemption through the story of Francesca and Paolo.

2. Who is Dante
Alighieri?

3. Durante “Dante” Alighieri
 The greatest Italian poet and
one of the most important
writers in Europian Literature.
 was born Durante Alighieri in
Florence, Italy in 1265

4.  In his youth, Dante studied many
subjects, including Tuscan poetry,
painting, and music. He later turned
his attention to philosophy.
 He is best known for the epic
poem Commedia and later named
La Divina Commedia.

5.  Commedia was completed just before
the poet’s death. He probably started to
write it in 1307. The Purgatorio was
composed in Verona, where he stayed
more or less continuosly from late 1312 to
mid-1318. In Ravenna, he wrote the final
phases of the Paradiso. By the time the
first two parts of the Comedy had
been sent in circulation, Dante
was being acclaimed
through much of
Tuscany as its greatest
poet.

6.  Dante is credited with “terza
rima”, composed of tercets
woven into a linked rhyme
scheme, and chose to end each
canto of the The Divine Comedy
with a single line that completes
the rhyme scheme with the
end-word of the second line of
the preceding tercet.

7. The Middle Ages
 It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and
merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery.
 It lasted from the 5th to the 15th century.
The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional
divisions of Western history: Antiquity, Medieval period, and
Modern Period.

8. Birth of an Idea
Starting around the 14th century, European
thinkers, writers and artists began to look
back and celebrate the art and culture of
ancient Greece and Rome. Accordingly, they
dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as
a “Middle” or even “Dark” age in which no
scientific accomplishments had been made,
no great art produced, no great leaders born.

9.  After the fall of Rome, no
single state or government
united the people who lived on
the European continent.
Instead, the Catholic Church
became the most powerful
institution of the medieval
period.
The Catholic Church

12. Meanwhile, the Islamic world
was growing larger and more
powerful. After the prophet
Muhammad’s death in 632 CE,
Muslim armies conquered large
parts of the Middle East, uniting
them under the rule of a single
caliph. At its height, the
medieval Islamic world was
more than three times bigger
than all of Christendom.
The Rise of Islam

15. The Crusades
Towards the end of the 11th century,
the Catholic Church began to
authorize military expeditions, or
Crusades, to expel Muslim “infidels”
from the Holy Land.
Crusaders, who wore red crosses
on their coats to advertise their
status, believed that their service
would guarantee the remission of
their sins and ensure that they could
spend all eternity in Heaven.

18. Art and Architecture
Another way to show devotion to
the Church was to build grand
cathedrals and other
ecclesiastical structures such as
monasteries. Cathedrals were the
largest buildings in medieval
Europe, and they could be found
at the center of towns and cities
across the continent.

19. Between the 10th and 13th
centuries, most European
cathedrals were built in the
Romanesque style. Romanesque
cathedrals are solid and
substantial; they have rounded
masonry arches and barrel vaults
supporting the roof, thick stone
walls and few windows.

20. Around 1200, church builders began to
embrace a new architectural style,
known as the Gothic. In contrast to
heavy Romanesque buildings, Gothic
architecture seems to be almost
weightless. Medieval religious art took
other forms as well. Frescoes and
mosaics decorated church interiors, and
artists painted devotional images of the
Virgin Mary, Jesus and the Saints.

21. Also, before the invention of the printing press in the
15th century, even books were works of art. Craftsmen
in monasteries (and later in universities) created
illuminated manuscripts: handmade sacred and
secular books with colored illustrations, gold and
silver lettering and other adornments. In the 12th
century, urban booksellers began to market smaller
illuminated manuscripts, like books of hours, psalters
and other prayer books, to wealthy individuals.

22. Economics and Society
In Medieval Europe, rural life was governed by a
system scholars call “feudalism.” In a feudal society,
the king granted large pieces of land called fiefs to
nobleman and bishops.
Landless peasants known as serfs did most of the
work on the fiefs: They planted and harvested crops
and gave most of the produce to the landowner. In
exchange for their labor, they were allowed to live on
the land. They were also promised protection in case
of enemy invasion.

23. During the 11th century, however, feudal life began to
change. Agricultural innovations such as the heavy plow
and three-field crop rotation made farming more efficient
and productive, so fewer farm workers were needed. As
a result, more and more people were drawn to towns
and cities.

26. The very ugly Minos pauses his
perpetual dissing of sinners long
enough to warn Dante and Virgil
to be careful whom they trust.
Virgil shoots back with a "God
protects us" line, but we can see
right through him. He’s as scared
as Dante.
On that note, they come to the
edge of a cliff and see a
hurricane-strength whirlwind
buffeting the souls of the
Lustful. Dante compares them to
birds like starlings, cranes, and
doves because of their helplessness
against the wind and because of
the cacophonous cries they emit.

27. Dante asks Virgil to identify some of the individual
souls to him, and included there are the following:
Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Paris,
Tristan.
Star-struck by such names, Dante feels sorry for
them and calls out to a couple, wanting to talk to
them.
They approach them and the female soul speaks.
She’s really polite and talks in a highfalutin’ style, as
if she’s stuck in the rhetoric of courtly love. She
thanks Dante for being so kind as to speak nicely to
her, then tells her story.

28. She’s Francesca da Rimini, an
Italian (from Ravenna) and, in
terms of blood, she is
something like a princess.
During her life, she was forced
into a loveless political marriage
with a guy called Gianciotto
Malatesta.
However, she fell in love
with her husband’s
younger brother Paolo
and had an affair with
him.

29. Dante is so moved by the unfairness
of it all that he starts crying. He
tends to do this a lot. And he asks
how exactly she fell in love.
Francesca says that one sunny day,
she and Paolo were innocently
reading a book. But not just any
book. This one portrayed the knight
Lancelot being hopelessly smitten by
Queen Guinevere. When they get to
the part where Lancelot kisses
Arthur’s queen, Paolo and Francesca
followed suit and shared a passionate
kiss.

30. Francesca blames the book for
her sin, calling it a Gallehault
(the character in Arthurian
legend who encourages
Lancelot in his forbidden affair
with Guinevere).
As Francesca concludes her
story, her soul mate Paolo
bawls his eyes out.
Now Paolo and Francesca are
doomed to spend eternity in
the Second Circle of Hell.
Overcome with pity, Dante
faints again.

32. The true beginning of Hell is in the second circle.
It is where the true punishments of Hell begins.
Circle II is the circle of carnal lust. This is where
Minos judges the sinners must go.
This canto begins in the descriptions of the circles
devoted to the sins of incontinence: the sins of the
appetite, the sins of self-indulgence, and the sins
of passion.

33. Dante draws the character of Minos both from
the Aeneid and from ancient mythology, just as
he takes the three-headed dog Cerberus from
Greek stories of the afterlife.
By placing pagan Gods and monsters in an
otherwise Christian model of the afterlife, Dante
once again demonstrates his tendency to mix
vastly different religious and mythological
traditions. It indicates the extent to which
mythological and literary sources share space in
Dante’s imagination with religious and
theological sources.

34. Among those whom Dante sees in Circle II
are people such as Cleopatra, Dido, and
Helen. Some of these women, besides being
adulteresses, have also committed suicide.
Therefore, the question immediately arises
as to why they are not deeper down in Hell
in the circle reserved for suicides. Remember
that in Dante's Hell, a person is judged by
his own standards, that is, by the standards
of the society in which he lived.

35. Dante thought of Hell as a place where the
sinner deliberately chose his or her sin and
failed to repent. This is particularly true of the
lower circles, which include malice and fraud.
Francesca is passionate, certainly capable of
sin, and certainly guilty of sin, but she
represents the woman whose only concern is
for the man she loves, not her immortal soul.
She found her only happiness, and now her
misery, in Paolo's love. Her love was her
heaven; it is now her hell.

36. Dante the poet intends to assert the existence of an
objectively just moral universe; yet he also imbues
Paolo and Francesca with great human feeling, and
the sensual language and romantic style.
Dante’s own life was marked by a deep love, his
love for Beatrice. Still, his damnation of the lovers
suggests a moral repudiation of his own
biographical and poetic past. In a certain sense, The
Divine Comedy as a whole can be read as Dante’s
attempt to transpose his earthly love for Beatrice
onto a spiritual, Christian, morally perfect plane.

37. In Hell, sinners retain all those qualities for which
they were damned, and they remain the same
throughout eternity.
Consequently, as Francesca loved Paolo in the
human world, throughout eternity she will love him
in Hell. But, the lovers are damned because they will
not change, and because they will never cease to
love, they can never be redeemed.
Dante represents this fact metaphorically by placing
Paolo close to Francesca and by having the two of
them being buffeted about together through this
circle of Hell for eternity.

38. By reading the story of Francesca, one can perhaps
understand better the intellectual basis by which
Dante depicts the other sins in Hell. He chooses a
character that represents a sin; he then expresses
poetically the person who committed the sin.
Francesca is not perhaps truly representative of the
sin of this circle, and "carnal lust" seems a harsh
term for her feelings, but Dante chose her story to
make his point: The sin in Circle II is a sin of
incontinence, weakness of will, and falling from
grace through inaction of conscience. Many times
in Hell, Dante responds sympathetically or with
pity to some of these lost souls.

39. This canto clearly illustrates the difference in
the two Persona: Dante the Pilgrim and
Dante the Poet.
Dante the Pilgrim weeps and suffers with
those who are suffering their punishments.
He reacts to Francesca's love for Paolo, her
horrible betrayal, and her punishment so
strongly that he faints.
Yet it is Dante the Poet who put her in Hell.

43. Dante

44. Virgil

45. Paolo and francesca

46. Minos

49. Symbols
A person, object, action, place or
event that in addition to its literal
or denotative meaning suggests a
more complex meaning or range
of meanings.

50. The entire story of The Divine
Comedy itself, symbolizing the
spiritual quest of human life.

53. Minos
Acts like a judge in Canto V.

56.  The poem shows that our life is a journey.
One man must go through his journey and
overcome obstacles to achieve the ultimate goal
with the Will of God.
 this poem focuses mainly on life as a spiritual
journey. The obstacles the traveler must
overcome are temptation and sin.

57.  Even if a person commit mistakes, he is not
lost.
 The soul will be restored when one contrite
sincerely and repent for all the sin he/she had
done. With that, the soul is eligible for entrance
into heaven.

58.  Dante creates an imaginative correspondence
between a soul’s sin on Earth and the
punishment he or she receives in Hell.