This essay has an ambitious aim: to shed clear light after seven centuries on the phrases, allegories and characters of the Divine Comedy, shrouded in obscure ambiguity by Dante Alighieri's studied words. This work is the result of careful and documented research, involving phonological linguistics, history, historical economics, theology, mathematics, philosophy and medieval art history. In this way, sources hitherto not fully understood or even unknown were found with a high degree of probability, as certainty could be deemed presumption. These have enabled the Poet to construct the basic warp of the Poem when he was in Florence, and then patiently and painstakingly weave it during the difficult years of exile, decorating it with characters he met and events he experienced, both in his nostalgia for Florence and in his daily actuality. This warp is revealed here and exploits, in ways still in use today in modern information technology and with a hitherto misunderstood systematicity, today's positional numbering system, introduced to the general public half a century before Dante's birth.
In order to communicate the basic message, centred on the figure of the Saviour at the moment of the Easter Passion and Resurrection, Dante develops an aesthetic of dualism in contrast to the messages of theocratic unity of the ecclesiastical hierarchies of his time and in adherence to the Gospel message, renewed in the preaching of the new mendicant orders.
He is, however, neither a heretic nor a sectarian, but a Christian of profound faith, in which a brilliant rationality is interpenetrated, and for this reason he uses biblical-like modes in the cross-referenced construction of the Poem. In his journey of judgement on his times, he is guided, in entrusting himself to the Church as to a Mother, by his admiration for the imperial figure, embodied by Frederick II of Swabia and revived before his eyes by Henry VII of Luxembourg, the holiness in the government of a people of St Louis IX of France, the prophetic-apocalyptic holiness of Joachim of Fiore and the wholly spiritual holiness of St Francis of Assisi. In this way, in Inferno we come to understand which figure inspired the Veltro and the Veglio di Creta, to decipher Pluto's exclamation, to unmask many characters from myth and biblical history presented there, to reveal Purgatory's theological-doctrinal structure and to give Paradise the value of a premonition of the end with the reunion with family affection and God's paternal embrace.