Dante's Inferno Quiz
Twenty questions on the opening third of the Inferno, each answer anchored to the Italian text and its line number. Answers and explanations are on the page — take it as a quiz, or read it as a study key.
This quiz covers the stretch of the Inferno that Reading Dante has read line by line: Canto I through Canto X, from the dark wood to the burning tombs of the heretics. The last question jumps to the final line of the canticle, because everybody should know where the poem is going.
Each answer cites the canto and line it rests on. Where a question turns on a word in the Italian, the Italian is quoted — translations differ enough that an English-only answer would sometimes be wrong.
or just read the answers below
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Question 1 of 20
The Inferno opens "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita." How old is the pilgrim meant to be?
Answer: Thirty-five
Dante treats the full span of a life as the seventy years of Psalm 90, so its midpoint is thirty-five. The poem is set at Easter 1300 and Dante was born in 1265 — which makes the pilgrim exactly the poet's own age at the fiction's date.
Inferno I.1
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Question 2 of 20
Three beasts drive Dante back as he tries to climb the hill in Canto I. What are they?
Answer: A leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf
In Italian they are a lonza, a leone, and a lupa. The lonza is the contested one — most translators give "leopard," but the word may name a lynx or any spotted cat, and the animal's identity is still argued.
Inferno I.31–60
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Question 3 of 20
Who sends Virgil to rescue Dante?
Answer: Beatrice
Beatrice comes down to Limbo and asks Virgil to go — "I' son Beatrice che ti faccio andare." She was sent in turn by St. Lucy, who was sent by a "donna gentil" in Heaven understood to be the Virgin. So three women set the poem in motion before Virgil moves at all.
Inferno II.43–108
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Question 4 of 20
The inscription over the Gate of Hell ends with which line?
Answer: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
All four are lines of the inscription, but "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" is the ninth and last — the one usually quoted as "abandon all hope." The three wrong options are lines 1, 5, and 7 of the same nine.
Inferno III.9
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Question 5 of 20
Before Dante reaches the first circle he passes a crowd that gets no circle at all. Who are they?
Answer: Those who lived "sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo" — without blame and without praise
They are the indifferent, in the vestibule on the near side of the Acheron. Hell proper will not take them and Heaven will not either. Virgil tells Dante not to discuss them: "non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa."
Inferno III.31–69
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Question 6 of 20
Who ferries the damned across the river Acheron?
Answer: Charon
Charon, the white-haired boatman, who refuses Dante because he is alive. Phlegyas is the other ferryman in the Inferno — he rows the Styx four cantos later, and the two are easy to confuse.
Inferno III.70–136
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Question 7 of 20
Virgil explains that the souls of the first circle are not punished for anything they did. What is their condition?
Answer: They lacked baptism, and live in longing without hope
Their only defect is that they did not have the faith, and Virgil includes himself: "E di questi cotai son io medesmo." Their punishment is desire with no hope of satisfying it — "sanza speme vivemo in disio."
Inferno IV.31–63
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Question 8 of 20
Dante says he became "sesto tra cotanto senno" — sixth among such wisdom. Who are the other five?
Answer: Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil
The four poets who come to greet Virgil are Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan; with Virgil himself that makes five, and Dante walks in as the sixth. It is one of the boldest claims any poet has made about his own standing, and he makes it in a line and a half.
Inferno IV.64–105
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Question 9 of 20
Who assigns each arriving soul its circle, and how?
Answer: Minos, by coiling his tail around himself
Minos "giudica e manda secondo ch'avvinghia" — he judges and sends according to how he winds. The number of coils is the number of the circle. He hears each soul's confession first, which makes the scene a parody of the sacrament.
Inferno V.1–24
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Question 10 of 20
Who speaks the line "Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona"?
Answer: Francesca da Rimini
Francesca, in the second circle. It is the middle of three consecutive lines she opens with the word Amor — lines 100, 103, and 106 — and the grammar is doubled back on itself so tightly that no two English translations agree on it.
Inferno V.103
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Question 11 of 20
What were Paolo and Francesca reading when they first kissed?
Answer: The romance of Lancelot
"di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse" — the French prose Lancelot, in which Guinevere is kissed by the queen's go-between Galehaut. Francesca then calls the book itself the pander: "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse."
Inferno V.127–138
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Question 12 of 20
Which creature guards the third circle, where the gluttons lie in the rain?
Answer: Cerberus
Cerberus, the three-throated dog, who flays and quarters the souls. Virgil silences him by throwing earth into his three gullets — a detail Dante takes from the Aeneid and makes squalid.
Inferno VI.1–33
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Question 13 of 20
A Florentine sits up out of the freezing rain in the third circle to prophesy his city's future. Who is he?
Answer: Ciacco
Ciacco, the first of the poem's political prophets. His name means something like "hog," and whether it is a nickname or a real surname has been argued since Boccaccio. All four of the others are Florentines Dante meets in Hell, which is the trap in this question.
Inferno VI.34–93
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Question 14 of 20
In the fourth circle the hoarders and the spenders shove weights at each other while shouting two phrases. What are they?
Answer: "Perché tieni?" and "Perché burli?" — Why hoard? and Why squander?
Each group accuses the other of the opposite vice, which is why Dante puts them in one circle rather than two: hoarding and squandering are the same disordered relation to goods, read from either end. The wrong options are real lines of the poem — Plutus's cry and Nimrod's gibberish — just not these souls'.
Inferno VII.1–66
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Question 15 of 20
Virgil calls Fortune a "beata" intelligence who does not hear the cursing of the damned. What is his point?
Answer: Fortune is an appointed minister of providence, not blind chance
Dante takes the classical goddess and demotes her into a civil servant of heaven: she turns her wheel on orders, so what looks like luck is administration. "Ma ella s'è beata e ciò non ode" — she is blessed, and does not hear them.
Inferno VII.67–96
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Question 16 of 20
Who rows Dante and Virgil across the Styx?
Answer: Phlegyas
Phlegyas, who comes "con un sol fante" in a swift skiff and is furious to find he has gained nothing. Charon rows the Acheron, three rivers earlier; Geryon and Nessus carry Dante further down, but not here.
Inferno VIII.1–30
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Question 17 of 20
The devils bar the gate of the city of Dis and Virgil cannot open it. Who does?
Answer: A messenger from Heaven, who crosses the Styx without wetting his feet
"Passava Stige con le piante asciutte" — he walks the marsh dry-shod, opens the gate with a wand, and leaves without speaking to the travellers. Dante never names him, and the identification has been argued for seven centuries.
Inferno IX.64–105
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Question 18 of 20
Inside the walls of Dis the souls lie in open tombs under fire. What is their sin?
Answer: Heresy
"Qui son li eresïarche con lor seguaci" — the heresiarchs and their followers, in the sixth circle. It is the only sin Dante cannot fit into either the incontinence above or the malice below, which is part of why its placement has been so much discussed.
Inferno IX.106–133
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Question 19 of 20
A Ghibelline captain rises from one of those tombs "com'avesse l'inferno a gran dispitto." Who is he?
Answer: Farinata degli Uberti
Farinata, who rises from the waist up as though he held Hell itself in great contempt, and whose first question to Dante is about his ancestry rather than his sin. Cavalcante rises from the same tomb twenty lines later — a different man, and the near-miss this question is built on.
Inferno X.31–51
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Question 20 of 20
What is the last line of the Inferno?
Answer: E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle
All three of the first options are canticle endings — Dante closes the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso on the word stelle. "E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle" is Inferno XXXIV.139; the others end Purgatorio XXXIII.145 and Paradiso XXXIII.145.
Inferno XXXIV.139
Read these cantos line by line
Every answer above links to the passage it comes from. The whole sequence, in order, is in the Inferno archive — the Italian text, tercet by tercet, with notes on what the translations do and do not catch.