hill

Description

In Canto I of the Inferno, the hill is the summit that Dante sees at the end of the slope after the wood: the note to v. 77 identifies it with the «dilettoso monte», the way of happiness according to the Aristotelian definition of the good as principle and cause, taken up by Thomas. The note to v. 78 clarifies that it concerns happiness within the limits of nature, corresponding to the state of man in the earthly paradise. The introduction to Canto I explicitly situates the initial landscape – «a wood, a slope, a hill» – as a figure of the story of man, from darkness to light, from sorrow to happiness. In Purgatorio XIII, however, Sapia reproachfully recalls her fellow citizens placed «presso a Colle», a Tuscan locality with which the term takes on a historical-geographical meaning, distinct from the allegorical one of the Dantean hill.