The Divine Comedy

In the spring of 1300, halfway through his life, Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood. The Roman poet Virgil appears and leads him down through the nine circles of Hell, where he meets the lovers Paolo and Francesca and the starving Count Ugolino, then up the mountain of Purgatory, until Beatrice, the woman he loved in his youth, guides him through the spheres of Paradise to the vision of God.

Written in a hundred cantos of interlocking three-line stanzas, the Comedy shaped how Europe imagined the afterlife and turned Italian into a literary language. Scholars have long debated whether Dante knew the Latin translation of the story of the Prophet's Night Journey; readers of Arabic can compare it with al-Ma'arri's Epistle of Forgiveness, another visit to the afterlife among poets.

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was born in Florence and, as a boy of nine, saw Beatrice Portinari, the woman who would inspire his poetry for the rest of his life, as he tells in La Vita Nuova. He became a poet, a soldier and a politician, and in 1302 was exiled by his political enemies under threat of death.

He never returned to Florence. In exile, moving between the courts of northern Italy, he wrote The Divine Comedy, placing friends and enemies in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. He died in Ravenna, where he is buried, and the city of Florence still keeps an empty tomb for him.