Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
70 free Dante Alighieri trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in exile, under a death sentence from his own city, and it made him the father of the Italian language. This quiz covers the poem itself: the three guides, the hundred cantos and terza rima, the nine circles of Hell and who is in them, from Francesca da Rimini and Ulysses to Count Ugolino and the three traitors in Lucifer's mouths, then up the seven terraces of Purgatory and through the spheres of Heaven to the Empyrean. It also covers the man: the boy who met Beatrice at nine, the cavalryman at Campaldino, the White Guelph politician betrayed by Boniface VIII, the wanderer sheltered in Verona and Ravenna, the treatise a cardinal wanted burned along with his bones, and the empty tomb Florence built for a poet whose remains it never got back. It is written for students, readers of the Comedy and anyone who wants to test what they remember from a literature course. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Dante, the Divine Comedy and its three cantiche, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Roman poet guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory?
Virgil
He represents human reason, and his Aeneid is praised in the poem with language Dante otherwise reserves for Scripture.
Q 02Who takes over from Beatrice as Dante's guide for the final cantos of Paradiso?
Bernard of Clairvaux
The Cistercian abbot stands for contemplative mysticism and devotion to Mary, and he leads Dante to the vision of God.
Q 03Into how many cantos is the whole Divine Comedy divided?
100
Each of the three parts has 33 cantos, and a single introductory canto brings the total to a round hundred.
Q 04What is the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme of the Divine Comedy called?
Terza rima
Its lines run ABA BCB CDC, in eleven-syllable lines, so each tercet holds 33 syllables, matching the canto count of each part.
Q 05Who first attached the adjective 'Divine' to the poem Dante had simply called Comedy?
Boccaccio
He used it in a treatise in praise of Dante written in the 1350s; the first edition to print Divina Comedia on its title page came only in 1555.
Q 06Which single word ends each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy?
Stelle (stars)
The device ties the whole journey to the heavens: each cantica closes with the pilgrim looking upward.
Q 07In what year is Dante's journey through the afterlife set?
1300
The pilgrim is 35, halfway through the biblical lifespan of seventy, which is how scholars work back to Dante's own birth date.
Q 08On the eve of which Christian holy day does the poem begin?
Good Friday
The whole journey runs to the Wednesday after Easter, and Dante and his guide reach Purgatory on Easter Sunday itself.
Q 09Which three beasts block Dante's path in the dark wood at the start of the poem?
A lion, a leopard and a she-wolf
They are usually read as the three kinds of sin that also organise Hell: the self-indulgent, the violent and the malicious.
Q 10How many circles does Dante's Hell have?
Nine
Each realm follows the same pattern of a special ten: the circles then Lucifer at the bottom, the rings of Purgatory then Eden, the heavens then the seat of God.
Q 11The inscription over the gate of Hell famously ends with which words?
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
Just inside, the Uncommitted, who took no side in life, chase a wavering banner for eternity while wasps sting them.
Q 12Dante's shade who made 'the great refusal' at Hell's entrance is usually identified as which pope?
Celestine V
He abdicated the papacy in 1294, clearing the way for the pope who became Dante's great enemy.
Q 13Who ferries souls across the river Acheron and at first refuses to carry the living Dante?
Charon
Dante's guide silences him with the formula 'It is so willed there where is power to do that which is willed'.
Q 21What is the name of the Eighth Circle, a funnel of ten concentric ditches for the fraudulent?
Malebolge
The name means 'evil ditches'; each bolgia holds a different kind of fraud, from panderers and flatterers to counterfeiters.
Q 22Which Greek hero among Dante's counsellors of fraud tells of a last voyage past the Pillars of Hercules?
Ulysses
The voyage is Dante's own invention: the crew drowns within sight of Mount Purgatory, having sailed for knowledge without wisdom.
Q 23Count Ugolino, frozen in the Ninth Circle, eternally gnaws the head of which man?
Archbishop Ruggieri
The two conspired to seize Pisa in 1288, then the archbishop turned on him and locked him in a tower to starve with his sons.
Q 14Which classical judge of the dead assigns each damned soul to its circle by coiling his tail?
Minos
Every soul must confess its sins to him at the entrance to the Second Circle, where Hell proper begins.
Q 15Which three-headed beast guards the gluttons in the Third Circle?
Cerberus
Dante calls him 'the great worm', and the gluttons he mauls lie in freezing, putrid slush under an endless icy rain.
Q 16Francesca da Rimini, whom Dante meets among the lustful, fell in love with which man?
Paolo, her brother-in-law
Her deformed husband Gianciotto surprised the pair and stabbed them both to death sometime between 1283 and 1286.
Q 17Francesca says she and her lover yielded to their passion while reading about which legendary couple?
Lancelot and Guinevere
She calls the book and its author a 'Galeotto', a go-between, after Gallehaut, who encouraged the two lovers in the romance.
Q 18Farinata degli Uberti, whom Dante meets in a flaming tomb, is punished in the circle of which sin?
Heresy
The Ghibelline leader is remembered for protesting the proposed destruction of Florence after Montaperti; he was posthumously condemned as an Epicurean.
Q 19In the first round of the Seventh Circle, murderers and tyrants are immersed in what?
A river of boiling blood
Centaurs patrol the bank, shooting arrows at any sinner who rises higher out of the Phlegethon than his guilt allows.
Q 20Which winged monster of fraud carries Dante and his guide down the cliff to the Eighth Circle?
Geryon
He has the face of an honest man, hairy arms, a reptile's body and a scorpion's sting: fraud with a pleasant front.
Q 24What is the Ninth Circle of Hell, home of the traitors, made of?
A frozen lake
Its four rounds are named Caina, Antenora, Ptolomaea and Judecca after four archetypal traitors, and the worst sinners are sealed completely in ice.
Q 25Who is chewed in the central mouth of Lucifer at the very bottom of Hell?
Judas Iscariot
The two side mouths hold Caesar's assassins, whose crime, to Dante, was destroying a divinely appointed unified Italy.
Q 26How is Lucifer positioned at the centre of Hell?
Trapped waist-deep in ice
His six bat-like wings beat uselessly, and the icy wind they raise is what freezes the lake around him.
Q 27Where does Dante place the Mountain of Purgatory?
On an island in the southern ocean
It rose from rock displaced when Satan fell to earth, and it is the only land in the southern ocean; the Garden of Eden sits at its summit.
Q 28Which pagan Roman is the guardian of the shores of Purgatory?
Cato of Utica
His presence there puzzled commentators for centuries, since he was a suicide and no Christian.
Q 29At the gate of Purgatory an angel carves which letter, one for each deadly sin, on Dante's forehead?
P
It stands for peccatum, sin; one mark is brushed away by an angel's wing as Dante leaves each terrace.
Q 30How many terraces does Mount Purgatory have?
Seven
Below them lies Ante-Purgatory, holding the excommunicated and the late repentant, and the Garden of Eden crowns the summit.