Riddles of The Inferno (Dan Brown)

By: Justin Zablocki (author, Zablocki Bros. LLC) on October 14th, 2013 12:00 AM.

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This novel is the most recent installation of books staring Harvard professor Robert Langdon. This novel is just as full of riddles, art, and secret societies as all of the others. This time the novel begins with him in danger rather than somebody else. He wakes up in a hospital with no recollection of the past few days. The first riddle of the book and his first riddle comes after he and one of his doctors, Sienna Brooks, escape to her apartment from an assassin who comes to the hospital to kill him. The clue is inside of a cylinder marked with a bio-hazard symbol. Once he opens this cylinder he finds a medieval bone cylinder with a projector in it that displays Botticelli's Map of Hell that says:

The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death.

He believes that this has something to do with Dante so he heads to the Old City but is deferred when the police have blocked bridges looking for them. While he is deferred he looks closer at the illumination, noticing that the ten layers of the eighth circle of Hell have had a letter added to each of the layers to spell:

CATROVACER

He also notices that each of these layers is out of order and when ordered correctly it spells:

CERCA TROVA

Robert notices that these words are also on the painting "The Battle of Marciano" by Vasari. Robert and Sienna manage to make it to the Old City. He goes to the painting and tries to connect it to the message on the Map of Hell. The director of the museum takes them upstairs to Dante's death mask. While she is taking them upstairs Robert sees the message "cerca trova" on the painting which means "He who seeks, finds". She tells him that he was there the previous night for the same reason and she took them to the mask. At this point he realizes that he was retracing his steps from the previous night. When they go to the death mask it is gone but upon inspecting the security cameras they realize Robert himself stole the mask with a man named Ignazio. The museum director calls Ignazio but he has suffered a heart attack. Before he died he left a message for Robert regarding the masks location, simply said:

Paradise 25.

This clue leads them to the Florence Baptistery and the mask. This Baptistery has gates called the Gates of Paradise. But along with the mask they also find a riddle. With this Robert is captured by the World Health Organization that has been trying to stop Zobrist, the current owner of the mask. He recently committed suicide but created a virus that would be extremely detrimental to the world population before he died. He did this to control the world's population. At this point he learns that Sienna is an abbot follower of Zobrist and is on her way to Istanbul, Turkey. This is the solution to the riddle that they found with the death mask. Once they all arrive to the location they discover that Sienna has beaten them there and that the disease has been released and in turn, infected the world.

For more information about the novel visit the Wikipedia page.

For some more great riddles visit the Kids Riddles Section.