Abstract

Pietro Alighieri was a leading scholar and eminent judge of the Scaligeri court. Through the use of juridical sources ("Corpus iuris civilis", "Decretum Gratiani", the "Tractatus criminum"), in his commentary on the "Divine Comedy" he analyzes the lines, the characters and the episodes of Dante's work from a criminal perspective.The paper examines the cultural background of this interpretation and shows the novelty of Pietro's exegesis, which stresses the importance of the penal aspects of Dante's Hell.