In 1919 Don Miguel Asín Palacios announced that he finally discovered the real models that inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy. In his essay, La Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia, the Spanish arabist identified a series of Arab-Islamic written texts describing fully experiences of journey in the Afterworld.

Since the day after this publication, a large number of scholars animated a lively debate whose implications continue to amaze experts even today. Thus, an accurate picture of the literary criticism from the Fifties until today is presented hereunder. More specifically, the following excerpt examines the thorough research of Enrico Cerulli, the brilliant works of several intellectuals such as Francesco Gabrieli, Umberto Bosco and Giorgio Levi della Vida and the recent developments of the debate which claims as contributors distinguished Dante scholars like Carlo Saccone, Cesare Segre, Maria Corti and Luciano Gargan. To conclude, I remember the work of Ida Zilio-Grandi that was the last step within the renewed discussion about the true sources of Dante’s masterpiece – sublime symbol of the afterlife journey– from an Islamic point of view. See also my essays on the web dedicated to Dante and Islam and to the Liber Scalae and the Divine Comedy.

Casalino Pierluigi