In The Divine Comedy, some are damned because they are heretics or blasphemous against God, but most are condemned to Hell for having caused harm to others or for having committed violent acts against them. Those who are slothful, lustful, fraudulent, wrathful, thieves, sowers of discord, forgers, tyrants, and traitors transform the earthly lives of others into a tragic experience. Cain, the first man to be born of a human couple, murdered his own brother. 

With the advent of industrial society, evil too became industrialized. Megalopolises with their masses of wretches in miserable shacks expanded as never before. Factories and assembly lines transformed human beings into slaves forced to work at infernal rhythms. Mines with their shafts and labyrinthine galleries formed subterranean cities with workers resembling the damned of the earth. Prisons and asylums, constructed on the basis of the Panopticon model, seem to evoke circles of hell. War and its atrocities reached a new level with the diffusion of poison gas, incendiary bombs, and weapons of mass destruction. 

This mechanized universe of unprecedented violence reached the height of horror and cruelty with its death camps, evoking the extremes of Dante’s Inferno: a systematically arranged abyss with hosts of moaning human beings. The Romantic era, which saw the birth of this modern society, was also the time of the rediscovery of The Divine Comedy, especially the Inferno, with which it identified, turning the industrial city into a figuration of the “suffering city” on earth.