For Dante, hell was a concrete place, not a spiritual one; but in which region of the world had the poet chosen to place the terrible place? From where someone could access to hell according to Dante Alighieri?
The geographical knowledge of Dante stopped at the columns of Ercole in the west, in the east the Ganges; to the north Scotland and the Scandinavian territories, to the south the heart of Africa.
For Dante the world was divided into two hemispheres: the north (where there were lands and the Mediterranean) and the south (where there was nothing).
In the southern hemisphere, in the medieval ideology, the devil must have fallen, following the clash between the angels of God and the rebel angels; the lands, coming into contact with the devil, horrified, retreated into the northern hemisphere; Lucifer falls into the sea and reaches the center of the Earth; the only land that remains is purgatory, more than anything else a mountain; around the Earth there are the heavens, which are concentric and one surrounds the other, made of pure crystalline: the medieval man makes faith coincide with knowledge and Dante put hell right under Jerusalem, which according to him is at the center of the Mediterranean (in reality it is more to the east).
Hell is another world, with its woods, its plains, its rivers (Acheron, Styx, Plegetonde, Cocito), towers, reproduces the Fiorentina district, it is populated not only by the damned, but also by devils and monsters.
Hell for Dante is an inverted cone above Jerusalem, as you can also see from the picture of Dante’s hell published above.
Recommended insights: