L'Inferno  

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L'Inferno (1911) is an Italian film, loosely adapted from Inferno, the first canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. L'Inferno took over three years to make, and was the first full-length Italian feature film.

Plot

Dante is barred from entering the hill of salvation by three beasts that block his path (Avarice, Pride, and Lust). Beatrice descends from above and asks the poet Virgil to guide Dante through the Nine Circles of Hell. Virgil leads Dante to a cave where they find the river Acheron, over which Charon ferries the souls of the dead into Hell. They also see the three-headed Cerberus and Geryon, a flying serpent with a man's face. They see the Devil eating human beings whole, harpies eating the corpses of suicides, an evil man forced to carry his own severed head for eternity, people half-buried in flaming lava, etc.

There follows a series of encounters in which the two meet up with a number of formerly famous historical figures whose souls were denied by both Heaven and Hell, and they listen to some of their tales told in flashback. These characters include Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucanus, Cleopatra, Dido, the traitor Caiphus, Count Ugolino, Peter of Vigna, Francesca Da Rimini and her lover Paulo, Brutus and Cassius, Mohammed, and Helen of Troy. The film's main attraction is the fantastic set designs depicting the horrors of Hell, with excessive violence and gore, designed to frighten the audience into becoming pious or God-fearing.

Cast

  • Salvatore Papa as Dante Alighieri
  • Arturo Pirovano as Virgilio
  • Giuseppe de Liguoro as Il conte Ugolino
  • Augusto Milla as Lucifer
  • Attilio Motta
  • Emilise Beretta


See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "L'Inferno" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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