Divine Comedy

Dante probably begins composing the Commedia

Dante never titled the poem The Divine Comedy; that familiar adjective reached a printed title only in 1555.

No day, and no certain year

No surviving document identifies a day — or even an uncontested year — on which Dante began the poem. The 1308 date is reconstructed from internal historical allusions and the chronology of his other writings.

The Princeton Dante Project says most scholars place his first work on the poem approximately between 1306 and 1308. A University of Leeds overview dates Inferno to roughly 1307–1309, Purgatorio to 1310–1313 and Paradiso to 1313–1321.

A recent peer-reviewed argument places the beginning later, around 1310.

Which dates belong to what

The poem's fictional action occurs in spring 1300. That is not its date of composition, and not evidence that Dante had written any of it by then.

The three canticles were not composed simultaneously from a single starting date; their individual parts circulated only later.

The creative trigger is undocumented. A plausible chronology has Dante setting aside the unfinished Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia as the much larger project took shape during his exile.

The title came later

Dante called the poem Comedìa. The adjective “Divina” was posthumous — Giovanni Boccaccio was the first known writer to apply “divine” to it — and it became part of the printed title in 1555.

The finished work runs to 14,233 lines across 100 cantos: 34 in Inferno, 33 in Purgatorio, 33 in Paradiso.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1308.

What the sources leave uncertain

The approximate start has been placed variously around 1304, 1306–1308 and, in a recent dissenting argument, about 1310.
The poem's fictional action occurs in 1300; that is not its date of composition.
The event should never be rendered as a specific day unless new documentary evidence is cited.