Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Italian progressive rock band Metamorfosi released their album Purgatorio on October 14, 2016. The album’s tracklist features several references to the second half of Dante’s Divine Comedy including “Paradiso Terrestre”, “Porta del Purgatorio”, and “Beatrice”. The band previously released albums titled Inferno and Paradiso (see our post on those works here).
Italian death metal band Kyterion released their album titled Inferno I on July 22, 2016. The track titles and songs make frequent reference to the text of the Divine Comedy including “La selva de’ suicidi”, “Limbo”, and “L’etterno dolore”. This album will be discussed by scholar Francesco Ciabattoni in his contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.
The Metal Archives User “Samtropy” has this to say about the album:
“This is the first of trilogy Black/Death metal interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy by a band of anonymous Italians.
“As a concept, it’s pretty interesting: turning Dante’s words (in their original Florentine vernacular) into relentless song-sized chunks furious blackened death metal. If you’re short on time, the takeaway is: listen to this if that idea sounds good to you. Don’t if it doesn’t.” [. . .] –User “Samtropy”, The Metal Archives, June 8th, 2020 (retrieved November 29, 2021)
The full text of this archival review is available here.
A music video for one of the songs (“Gerione”), as well as other videos from the band, can be found here.
See our post about another metal adaptation of the Inferno here.
