How Dante's grudges, gossip and pettiness still inspire hundreds of years on

Dante Alighieri: poet, philosopher and potentially the pettiest man in all of 14th-century Italy. Which is, to be clear, meant entirely as a compliment.

If you’re not familiar with the name, and don’t know why anyone might be discussing a medieval poet’s levels of petty, let me introduce you: Dante (as he’s most commonly known – you know, like Beyoncé, or Cher), wrote a narrative poem made up of three sections – ‘Inferno’ (hell), ‘Purgatorio’ (purgatory) and ‘Paradiso’ (heaven), collectively known as The Divine Comedy. These poems are still famous today, partly because they have inspired loads of other cultural depictions of the afterlife since they were written – most recently, my book, The Dark Within Us, in which a modern teenager descends into Dante’s version of Hell.

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So, why do I call Dante petty? Well, in The Divine Comedy, he tells the story of himself as he heads on a walk through the afterlife. As he passes through Hell, Dante meets a host of sinners – some of whom were real people, living contemporaries, who he had some kind of grudge with. A grudge that led him to immortalise them, suffering in the flames of Hell. Which is, I hope we can all agree, petty behaviour. 

And look, I only like drama I’m not involved in personally, so a gothy account of the gossip from 14th century Florence? Sign me right up. Thankfully, the copy of Inferno I read as a 16-year-old included lots of study guides and footnotes, helpfully explaining who the Black Guelphs were, and why Dante was mad at the Pope. Imagine that – your personal grievances are still going strong almost 700 years on. You can see why he’s a literary icon. 

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At around the same time I first read Inferno, I decided I wanted to write a book, and although I didn’t really recognise it at the time, Inferno inspired me in more ways than just being a cool setting. For example, Dante wrote himself into his narrative. He was braver than me about it – the character in The Divine Comedy is literally called Dante, while I merely took inspiration from my life to invent my main character, Jenny. You see, as well as reading Inferno when I was 16, I also ran away from home, a decision that led to several years of sofa-surfing or otherwise insecure accommodation. So, you could argue that Jenny is a version of me – albeit much cooler and clearer-headed than I ever was. She begins the book sofa-surfing on her auntie’s couch, after a targeted cyber-bullying campaign leads her to fall out with her mum. 

But Jenny isn’t only based on me, in the same way that Dante wasn’t the only real person who ended up in his poetry.

She’s also based on the young people I met as a volunteer for SASH, a York-based youth homelessness charity. SASH pairs young people seeking a place to go with a spare bedroom in a volunteer’s home, and I worked with them for three years in between doing my day job and trying to finish writing this book. 

To be completely clear, Jenny is not any of the young people I met, any more than she’s actually me. I couldn’t populate the novel with real people. For one thing, it wouldn’t be fair to do that; the stories of the people who stayed with me aren’t mine to tell. 

But Jenny is a representation of something that is often hidden in plain sight, inspired by them: people surviving on friends’ bedroom floors, or on the sofas of family members, or living in the caravans and garden sheds of acquaintances until they run out of goodwill and places to crash. 

Dante’s writing of real people into his work is often read at least partly as a critique of the society he lived in, and this inspired me too: I have always believed that stories matter. That they can help people understand experiences they will never have. Stories can shine a light on reality, even though they’re fiction.   

So that’s what Dante’s Inferno inspired me to do, and even though I can only dream of achieving Dante-levels of pettiness, I hope I’ve done my medieval literary icon proud. 

The Dark Within Us by Jess Popplewell is out now in paperback (£8.99, Chicken House). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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