In the Inferno, the first part of Italian poet Dante’s Divine Comedy epic, Geryon is a winged beast with a poisonous sting at the tip of his tail. He dwells somewhere in the depths below the cliff between the seventh and eighth circles of Hell. Geryon rises from the pit at Virgil’s call and, to Dante’s horror, the Poets ride on Geryon’s back, and he slowly glides around and around the waterfall of the Phlegethon down the great depths to the Circle of Fraud.

(picture by Gustave Dore)

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