From clues placed on the Map, Langdon eventually deciphers a message: “ cerca trova,” Italian for “seek and ye shall find.” The phrase is famously painted in the background of The Battle of Marciano by Giorgio Vasari, which hangs in the nearby Palazzo Vecchio. He discovers a Faraday pointer in his coat pocket, which reveals a projection of Botticelli’s Map of Hell, based on Dante’s rendition in Inferno. The Consortium is led by “the provost,” an unnamed character who leads the organization from a yacht-turned-mobile command center, The Mendacium.įollowing his escape from the hospital, Langdon is taken to Sienna’s apartment, where he discovers her history as an ostracized genius child, and he attempts to piece together what has happened to him. Vayentha is revealed to be an agent of The Consortium, an independent, international organization focused on providing special ops to the highest bidder regardless of that bidder’s intentions. As Langdon attempts to get his bearings, an assassin named Vayentha arrives at the hospital and shoots his attending doctor in the chest in an attempt to break into Langdon’s room, but Langdon escapes with the help of a young British doctor named Sienna Brooks. At the beginning of the novel, Langdon awakens in a hospital in Florence, Italy with no recollection of how he got there or the last few days. The majority of Dan Brown’s Inferno is told in the past tense third person from the many points of view of an ensemble cast of characters but mostly from that of Professor Robert Langdon. This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of a derogatory reference to a Romani person.

This study guide refers to the 2013 Doubleday hardcover edition.Ĭontent Warning: Inferno depicts violence throughout and includes a scene of sexual assault.

Textual and thematic references to Inferno abound in Brown’s novel. Written in the 14th-century Tuscan dialect, the Divine Comedy is credited with establishing the modern Italian language, and Dante Alighieri remains one of the most important writers in the history of Italian literature.

The book’s title is a reference to Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s three-part epic poem Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy in English, which was completed in the year 1320 and traced Dante’s fictional pilgrimage through the three realms of the afterlife: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Heaven).

Inferno by dan brown