The Divine Comedy: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Divine Comedy, credited to Dante Alighieri, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Divine Comedy (Italian: Commedia, later christened “Divina” by Giovanni Boccaccio), written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, the last great work of literature of the Middle Ages and the first great work of the Renaissance. A culmination of the medieval world-view of the afterlife, it establishes the Tuscan dialect in which it is written as the Italian standard, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The Divine Comedy is composed of three canticas (or “cantiche”) — Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) — composed each of 33 cantos (or “canti”). The very first canto serves as an introduction to the poem and is generally not considered to be part of the first cantica, bringing the total number of cantos to 100. The poet tells in the first person his travel through the three realms of the dead, lasting during the Easter Triduum in the spring of 1300.

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Divine Comedy
• Author credits: Dante Alighieri
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 19
• Listed recording duration: 12:23:25

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• religion
• afterlife
• christianity

Track guide

1. 01 - Inferno: Canto I-Canto V — 43:11
2. 02 - Inferno: Canto VI-Canto X — 36:41
3. 03 - Inferno: Canto XI-Canto XV — 47:04
4. 04 - Inferno: Canto XVI-Canto XX — 30:37
5. 05 - Inferno: Canto XXI-Canto XXIV — 35:25
6. 06 - Inferno: Canto XXVI-Canto XXX — 36:44
7. 07 - Inferno: Canto XXXI-Canto XXXIV — 36:18
8. 08 - Purgatorio: Canto I-Canto V — 42:33
9. 09 - Purgatorio: Canto VI-Canto XI — 37:20
10. 10 - Purgatorio: Canto XII-Canto XVI — 33:15
11. 11 - Purgatorio: Canto XVII-Canto XXI — 35:32
12. 12 - Purgatorio: Canto XXII-Canto XXVII — 47:08
13. 13 - Purgatorio: Canto XXVIII-Canto XXXIII — 43:33
14. 14 - Paradiso: Canto I-Canto V — 41:08
15. 15 - Paradiso: Canto VI-Canto XI — 38:33
16. 16 - Paradiso: Canto XII-Canto XVI — 32:16
17. 17 - Paradiso: Canto XVII-Canto XVIII — 39:51
18. 18 - Paradiso: Canto XXII-Canto XXVII — 42:17
19. 19 - Paradiso: Canto XXVIII-Canto XXXIII — 44:10

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.