Dan Brown‘s Inferno will be released tomorrow, and it is currently the top ranked book on Amazon. To help you prepare, we found a few clues buried in a sample chapter of the new book.
We read a short sample of the novel that shows Brown’s hero Robert Langdon dreaming about “a writhing pair of legs, which protruded upside down from the earth, apparently belonging to some poor soul who had been buried headfirst to his waist.”
This is clearly a reference to Inferno, Dante Alighieri‘s 14th century epic poem that inspired the new book. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can download a free copy of the Inferno complete with annotations. Read the relevant section of the poem below…
In CANTO XIX of the Inferno, Dante discovers sinners buried upside down while their feet are burned. Italian Studies translated and annotated this canto online:
A sinner’s feet and legs up to the calf,
The rest of him remained stuffed down inside.The soles of both feet blazed all on fire;
The leg-joints wriggled uncontrollably:
They would have snapped any rope or tether.Just as a flame on anything that’s oily
Spreads only on the object’s outer surface,
So did this fire move from heel to toe.