How did the divine comedy get so famous?

Answer 1

"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri became famous due to its intricate depiction of the afterlife, its powerful poetry, and its exploration of moral and theological themes. The work's enduring popularity can also be attributed to its influence on Western literature and its cultural significance as a masterpiece of Italian literature.

Answer 2

Dante Alighieris Commedia, or as Boccaccio dubbed it, The Divine Comedy, may be famous unto poets and literature students for its rhyme pattern called terza rima combined with iambic pentameter that Dante kept as the single metric shape throughout the whole work.

For linguists it may hold such importance because it was the first important work in Italian language whereas many authors before and after were continuing to write in the classical writing language of the intellectuals, Latin.

But for everyone rather interested in the story itself, Dante created a remarkably detailed picture of the three worlds beyond: Inferno, Purgatorium, Paradisum.

Not only do these three depict the ecclesiastic system of the world of after death in such an acribic way that it seems to undermine the dogma of the church by taking every fact more precisely than the church itself, so that Dante was able to arrange people of his time into the different circles of hell, purgatory or heaven and thus passing judgment over his time and even over the way judgement has been made in his time.

The depiction of hell may be the most popular part in Dantes Commedia. It has been adapted in many works of visual art such as Gustave Dores etchings, as in videogames or in movies such as Se7en by David Fincher.

It may be the explicitness of Horror in the first part, Inferno that is mostly responsible for the whole work's fame. There has always been a fascination for the cruel and gruesome, and probably not just because of a reader's subconscious lust for dismay, suffering and pain, but also because of the whole structure of a human life this work conveys:

Dante finds himself lost in a wood, menaced by dangerous animals embodying his personal distress over a great crisis in life and is being taken by Vergil, his great idol, into the underworld to learn what is awaiting him after death. He learns the tortures of the most famous sinners and evildoers as well as the pleasures of heaven. This trip into the world beyond is supposed to give him insight and hope, and by reading the Commedia, we can easily see the dialectic, kathartic steps from Heaven to Hell not only as a strange joyride into places unknown to living eyes but also as the destination of the human mind itself.