Gustave Dore
You get the feeling that the Dantesque Florence or Purgatory on the streets was talking about a privation synonymous with the middle classes and those evil people who do not feel God's divine love in their hearts. Therefore, any of the creatures represented as fiends would be dumbed down by God to cleanse and purge their sin, taken to hell in the seven circles underneath the earth rather than seeing this as heaven. Heaven also exists under the earth for those with an understanding of God's divine love and the final circle with the sacred pool takes you to the core of the earth or dark matter. Often darkness is misunderstood as being only to do with death rather than a depth of the soul or your being and depending on your philosophy can also be about love. The love that is death is also known as eternal love and only the most transcendent special people to God would find this passage. There are many and varied interpretations of Dante but you feel by talking about the opposite your divine understanding is being tested. You feel like Dante only saw people as being part of God's divine domain rather than Hades and even his understanding of hell is through his eternal lover's eyes. The creatures in this place were also from God's divine domain, cleaning out the sinners from the earthly plato. The earth underneath the earth's surface for Dante consisted of landscape with hills and valleys. And also punishments for the sinners to perform to cleanse their sin. Even though Dante was written in the twelve to thirteen hundreds, it still feels relevant to the Italian Renaissance and the kind of general people on the street. The hills and valleys even though underneath the earth feel like they were accessed by the river Styx or a river of blood to take those responsible for sin to Hades on varying levels.
Gustave Dore
