The Comedy’s Hell is also a landscape, an extraordinary building, and Dante is its supreme architect. Not only for the precise construction of the poem, but also - as Laura Bossi points out in the text accompanying the exhibition - for the extreme attention given to the description of the infernal architecture. There is a sort of strictly geometric "master plan" that eliminates any residue of chaos. The urban intellectual builds an orderly Hell, an underground city that provides surveilled entrances, roads, gates, high walls guarded by monstrous sentries.

You can observe the details of the illustration by Sandro Botticelli on display here: the inverted cone of Hell is divided into nine descending circles, arranged in eight degrees comparable to the steps of an amphitheatre (the fifth and sixth circles being on the same degree), ever more narrow descending towards the centre of the Earth, where the damned are arranged according to the increasing gravity of their faults.

It was Lucifer’s fall in the centre of the Southern hemisphere to create the inverted cone, with the Devil stuck upside down in the centre of the Earth - the head and torso in the Northern Boreal hemisphere, the loins and legs in the South. You can imagine the lands displaced by this impact, which moved to form another cone: the mountain of Purgatory, exactly at the antipodes of Jerusalem.
Dante's cosmology is therefore “diabolocentric”. Lucifer is at the centre of the Earth. Indeed, at the centre of everything, since Earth is the centre of the universe, according to the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system.

The configuration of Dante's Hell has not ceased to stimulate scholars’ reflection, up to our times. A German art historian, Roland Krischel, has devoted a detailed essay to the possible influence of the infernal "funnel" on the design of the Anatomical Theatre of Padua, built between 1592 and 1594 in Palazzo Bo. Krischel also makes the bold suggestion that Galileo may have had a role in the design of the Theatre, based on his friendship with people involved in the project, and on the passage from the Two Lessons in which Galileo writes "this huge cavern distributed in 8 degrees, different from each other for greater or lesser distance from the centre: such that Hell becomes similar to a huge amphitheatre, which, degree by degree as it descends, it shrinks”.