In The Divine Comedy, the Italian word stelle, meaning “stars,” ends each of the three cantiche. The repeated word links Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso through a single image of movement toward the heavens.
At the end of Inferno, Dante and Virgil escape Hell and emerge to see the stars. Purgatorio ends with Dante purified and ready to ascend “unto the stars.” Paradiso closes with Dante’s vision of God and the famous image of divine love moving the sun and the other stars. In the original Italian, each final line ends with stelle.
This repetition is deliberate rather than accidental. Dante’s three-part structure moves from sin and despair toward repentance and finally divine illumination, so the stars become a verbal marker of hope and upward direction. The word is also easy to confuse with amore, which is crucial to the poem’s final line, but amore does not end all three cantiche.