Fuoco e fiamme. Storia e geografia dell’inferno

The book is a detailed and original journey in discovery of hell, in the sense of a physical and tangible place. Over the course of Christianity’s two thousand years of life, the existence of hell as a place that is truly identifiable and, for this very reason, exploited to influence collective behavior was a key factor, whose importance was strenuously defended by the religious authorities. If one excludes the literary side and Dante’s prototype, a “topographical” analysis of hell has never been proposed before now. Why was hell imagined in a certain way? Why was it so important to insist on its existence, not in a transcendent and immaterial dimension but as a real and tangible place, a part of the universe’s cosmology? And how was hell able to overcome the philosophical, theological, and cultural changes of the various historical eras,
reaching us as an integral part of Christian doctrine, albeit in an increasingly spiritual and immaterial form? Is the “physical” hell dead or does it still live in the imagination and sentiments of society? All these questions, which concentrate on a hell that isn’t metaphorical but instead can be localized in a material dimension, is the focus of this book, which concentrates on the
modern era (16th – 18th centuries) but also broadens its gaze to the debates that agitate humanity still today.