Next to Dante, as a poet, the Italians rank Ariosto, whose "Orlando Furioso," or Roland Insane, is a continuation of Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato." Drawing much of his material from the French romances of the Middle Ages, Ariosto breathes new life into the old subject and graces his tale with a most charming style.

His subject was parodied by Folengo in his "Orlandino" when Roland began to pall upon the Italian public.
The next epic of note in Italian literature is Torquato Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata," composed in the second half of the sixteenth century, and still immensely popular owing to its exquisite style.
Besides this poem, of which Godfrey of Bouillon is the hero and which is _par excellence_ the epic of the crusades, Tasso composed epics on "Rinaldo," on "Gerusalemme Conquistata," and "Sette Giornate del Mundo Creato." Some of Ariosto's contemporaries also attempted the epic style, including Trissino, who in his "Italia Liberata" relates the victories of Belisarius over the Goths in blank verse.

His fame, however, rests on "Sofonisba," the first Italian tragedy, in fact "the first regular tragedy in all modern literature." Although no epics of great note were written thereafter, Alamanni composed "Girone il Cortese" and the "Avarchide," which are intolerably long and wearisome.
"The poet who set the fashion of fantastic ingenuity" was Marinus, whose epic "Adone," in twenty cantos, dilates on the tale of Venus and Adonis.

He also wrote "Gerusalemme Distrutta" and "La Strage degl' Innocenti," and his poetry is said to have much of the charm of Spenser's.
The last Italian poet to produce a long epic poem was Fortiguerra, whose "Ricciardetto" has many merits, although we are told the poet wagered to complete it in as many days as it has cantos, and won his bet.
The greatest of the Italian prose epics is Manzoni's novel "I Promessi Sposi," which appeared in 1830.

Since then Italian poets have not written in the epic vein, save to give their contemporaries excellent metrical translations of Milton's Paradise Lost, of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Argonautica, the Lusiad, etc.
DIVINE COMEDY THE INFERNO _Introduction._ In the Middle Ages it was popularly believed that Lucifer, falling from heaven, punched a deep hole in the earth, stopping only when he reached its centre.