Dante is the poet who, in the Mega Campaign, is a real prisoner of the Hell he described, a petrified sage asking all comers the origin of evil; as Dante Durante he is also a prior of Florence in 1300, already returned from Hell.
| Type | Character |
| Spanish entry | Dante |
The stone sage
In Hell, on a platform ringed by tortured souls under a red light “like a stage”, sits a petrified figure like Rodin’s The Thinker. He asks all “What is the origin of evil?”, promising whoever answers “not with words but with deeds” the way out of Hell. It is a trap: he wants someone to take his hand and his place as Hell’s sage, for knowledge and the others’ escape. Through threats and poisoned answers the duel turns to the Tree of Knowledge (apple, serpent, sword) and to “if something is, it cannot be known”. In the bargaining he reveals that his mortal name was Dante.
The Villains of New Orleans meet him in Hell in the second part of the gesta of the Deep Ones. The same Dante appears in the Campaign of the Descent (CDI) as the sixth sage, guide of guides, tricked by devils into producing his writings.
Prior of Florence, 1300
In Florence, in the jubilee year, he is one of the six priors who rule the city absolutely for two or three months. He is married to Gemma, has three children (the eldest, Jacopo), and his father-in-law is Manetto Donati.
He proposed exiling the leaders of the Bianchi and Neri factions of Pistoia, and an accursed emissary sickened his children to bend his vote. The other priors mock his shutting himself away, but he does so to escape those possessing the palace, where infernal creatures want him out; he activates the defense protocol and seals the building.
When he emerges, an opaque cube descends and opens in layers like an onion, and he steps down shining, haloed. He knows what will happen (Whites, Blacks, Medici, armies), a burden “because there is a part only God knows”.
In his library under the yellow dome a locked drawer holds unopenable magic. He claims Ptolemy, whose portrait and hollow globe he shows, as a precursor: a magician who measured the world’s connections and foretold where Hell’s entrances lay.
One and the same
The mission sheet states that “Lord Prior Durando has returned from Hell, passing through Purgatory and glimpsing Paradise”. Florenzen thus finds, back from the journey, the stone sage the other two gestas meet.