The World Premiere of the Movie Inferno in Florence, Italy
Inferno is a 2013 mystery/thriller novel by American writer Dan Brown and the fourth book in his Robert Langdon series, following Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol.
The book was released by Doubleday on May 14, 2013.
It was number one on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction and Combined Print & E-book fiction for the first eight weeks of its release, and also remained on the list of E-book fiction for the first eight weeks of its release.
You can order the Inferno eBook
The novel is named after Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, the world-famous 14th century epic by Dante Alighieri.
In Italian, inferno means hell.
The novel is set in Florence, Venice, and finally Istanbul, but Florence is perhaps the most important location.
Summary
Professor Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital with a head wound and no memory of the last few days. His last memory is of him walking on the Harvard campus. However, he quickly realizes that he is now in Florence, Italy. Sienna Brooks, one of the doctors tending to him, tells him that he suffered a concussion from being grazed by a bullet and that he stumbled into the emergency ward. Suddenly, a female contract killer named Vayentha breaks into the hospital, shoots another doctor, and approaches Robert’s room. Sienna grabs Robert, and they flee to her apartment.
Robert finds a biohazard cylinder in his jacket and decides to call the U.S. consulate. He is told that they are searching for him and that they want his location. Robert gives them a location near the apartment out of respect for Sienna’s privacy. However, when he looks from the apartment window and sees an armed Vayentha pulling up to the location he has given them, Robert realizes that the U.S. government wants him killed. He opens the cylinder and finds a meal bone cylinder fitted with a hi-tech projector that emits a modified version of Botticelli’s Map of Hell. Suddenly, soldiers raid the building. Sienna and Robert narrowly escape.
Robert and Sienna head toward the Old City, believing that the cylinder must have something to do with Dante. However, they find that Florentine police officers and Carabinieri officers have sealed the bridges and are searching for them. They run into the Boboli Gardens, where a solution to the Map of Hell occurs to Robert: ten letters have been added to the ten layers of the Malebolge, and the layers have been rearranged. Moving them back yields “CERCA TROVA“, a reference to The Battle of Marciano by Vasari, located in Palazzo Vecchio. The mysterious soldiers appear again. Robert and Sienna reach the Old City using the Vasari Corridor.
Marta Alvarez, the director of the museum that houses the Battle of Marciano, recognizes Robert after he and Ignazio Busoni, the director of the Duomo, had met with her the previous night and asked to see Dante’s death mask, which sits in a room behind the Battle of Marciano. Robert realizes that he is retracing his steps from the previous night. Marta takes Robert and Sienna to the mask and find that it’s gone. They look at security footage and see Robert himself and Ignazio stealing the mask. The museum guards turn on Robert and Sienna. At this moment, Ignazio’s secretary calls Robert and tells him that he died of a heart attack and that his last words were “Paradise 25.”
Robert and Sienna escape the guards, but the soldiers arrive. They cross the attic over the Apotheosis of Cosimo I, where Sienna pushes Vayentha to her death. Robert connects the phrase “Paradise 25” to the Florence Baptistry, where he and Sienna find the Dante mask along with a riddle from its current owner, a billionaire geneticist named Bertrand Zobrist. A man named Jonathan Ferris, claiming to be from the World Health Organization (WHO), comes and helps them escape the soldiers. They follow the riddle to Venice, where Jonathan suddenly falls unconscious. Robert is captured by the black soldiers, while Sienna escapes.
Robert is taken to Elizabeth Sinskey, the director-general of the WHO, and receives an extensive explanation of what is happening: Zobrist, who committed suicide the week before, was a mad scientist and Dante fanatic who engineered a new strain of the Black Death to cleanse the world of overpopulation. Elizabeth raided Zobrist’s safe deposit box, found the cylinder, and flew Robert to Florence to follow the clues. However, Robert stopped calling in after meeting with Marta and Ignazio, and the WHO feared he betrayed them and was working with Zobrist to unleash the plague. The soldiers were the WHO’s SWAT team and never meant to kill Robert.
Zobrist had paid a shadowy consulting group called The Consortium to protect the cylinder until a certain date. When Elizabeth took it away, they were obligated to protect whatever the bone cylinder pointed to. They kidnapped Robert after the meeting with Marta and Ignazio, but Robert hadn’t yet solved the whole trial. They gave Robert drugs to erase his short-term memory, created a fake head wound, and staged every event up to this point so that Robert would desperately solve them. Sienna, Vayentha, and Jonathan are all actors working for The Consortium; the call to the U.S. consulate was also staged. The leader of The Consortium, having become aware of the bioterrorism plot, has agreed to cooperate with the WHO.
Sienna goes rogue and The Consortium realizes she was a secret supporter of Zobrist. She learned where the plague is being kept after Robert solved the riddle, and resolves to unleash it manually. Robert, the WHO, and The Consortium team up to stop her by going to the riddle’s actual location, Istanbul, where Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, is buried. At the Hagia Sophia, Robert and the others learn that the plague is in the Cistern, but discover that Sienna is already there. The bag that holds the plague has been broken, infecting all the tourists inside. Sienna runs out of the Cistern and shouts “fire”, which causes the tourists to stampede out into the city.
It is discovered Sienna didn’t puncture the bag; it was water soluble and had dissolved one week earlier in the Cistern waters, meaning that the whole world has already been infected. Moreover, Sienna was actually trying to stop the virus, but didn’t trust the WHO because samples of that virus would certainly find their way into weapons research. The leader of The Consortium tries to escape WHO custody with help from disguised underlings, but is caught later by Turkish police. It is implied that The Consortium will be investigated and ruined. Sienna receives amnesty in exchange for working with the WHO to address the crisis, since she is a medical doctor and transhumanist writer.
The virus employs DNA modification to cause infertility in one-third of humans. The virus has no cure, and even with future technology, changing the human genome back would be hazardous. The human race, therefore, has been forced into a new age of self-understanding.
Sienna and Elizabeth decide not to try to reverse Zobrist’s actions, with Sienna pointing out that doing so would be difficult and hazardous even for someone like Zobrist, and Elizabeth acknowledging that Zobrist had a point about the dangers of overpopulation.
Characters
- Robert Langdon: A professor of symbology at Harvard University.
- Bertrand Zobrist: A Transhumanist genius scientist who is obsessed with Dante’s Inferno and intent on solving the world’s overpopulation problem by releasing a virus.
- Sienna Brooks: A doctor and Zobrist’s former lover. She also worked for The Consortium. She helps Langdon find the virus Zobrist created, but her past relationship with Zobrist makes her loyalty to Langdon suspicious until the end of the novel. She was a loyal disciple of Zobrist until she reads his last letter and decides to get a hold of his new technology before it can fall into the wrong hands. She believes the World Health Organization will cooperate with other government agencies to use Zobrist’s new virus for weapons. She uses The Consortium and Robert to follow the Map of Hell and get to ground zero before everyone else, but realizes that Zobrist had set off a futile search as he released his virus well beforehand.
- Elizabeth Sinskey: The head of the World Health Organization; she hires Langdon to find Zobrist’s virus.
- The Provost: The head of The Consortium. He tries to accomplish Zobrist’s wishes by securing the location of the virus from Langdon and Sinskey and to divulge a video Zobrist made before his death to the media. When he learns that he was helping Zobrist in a bioterrorist attack, he helps the World Health Organization find the weapon. He is eventually arrested for his hand in the events.
- Vayentha: The Consortium’s agent in Florence; she has orders to follow Langdon and is later disavowed by The Consortium. She falls to her death following a confrontation with Robert and Sienna in the Palazzo Vecchio.
- Cristoph Brüder: Head of the SRS team (part of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) and is ordered by Sinskey to find Langdon after she lost contact with him.
- Marta Alvarez: An employee in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence who assists Langdon with Dante’s death mask. She is pregnant with her first child.
- Ignazio Busoni / il Duomino: The director of the Duomo in Florence; assists Langdon with Dante’s death mask. He succumbs to a heart attack prior to the events of the novel.
- Jonathan Ferris: An agent of The Consortium who pretends to be in league with the World Health Organization. He used fake eyebrows and a mustache to pretend to be Dr. Marconi at the beginning of the novel.
- Ettore Vio: The curator of St. Mark’s basilica in Venice.
- Mirsat: A tour guide of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
Film
Sony Pictures has dated a film adaptation to be released on October 14, 2016, with Ron Howard as director, David Koepp adapting the screenplay, and Tom Hanks reprising his role as Robert Langdon. Filming began on April 27, 2015, in Venice, Italy, and wrapped up on July 21, 2015.
Sony and Columbia Pictures has added a trio of international stars to the cast of Inferno, namely, Felicity Jones as Dr. Sienna Brooks, as well as Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, and Ben Foster.
Here you can find all Inferno movie news.
Florence Inferno blog
In Florence, Robert and Sienna visit many legendary places, full of mystery and incredibly important for Florentine art and history. From symbol to symbol, from adventure to adventure, they try to uncover many secrets.
In Florence Inferno, we will tell you all the secrets about the symbols and places in Florence that are mentioned in the book.
Florence Inferno tour
Florence Inferno also offers the walking tour of Florence; which lets you explore the city as though you’re actually walking side-by-side with the novel’s characters Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks.
Free PDF
» Here you can download a free excerpt from Inferno by Dan Brown (PDF).
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This post was originally published on May 14, 2013, and has been updated and enriched on June 13, 2016.
Picture: Inferno by Dan Brown by Boogy Stah / CC BY 2.0
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in my opinion inferno is a masterpiece createdby danbrown