The Divine Comedy

In the middle of his life, in the year 1300, Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood, and the Roman poet Virgil leads him down through the circles of Hell, past the inscription 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here', to the frozen lake at the bottom where Satan is held in the ice; then up the mountain of Purgatory, where souls are purified; and finally Beatrice, the woman he loved, guides him through the heavens to the vision of God. This edition joins Henry Francis Cary's English translation in blank verse with the dramatic engravings of Gustave Doré.

Cary's translation, completed in 1814 and praised by Coleridge, was the English Dante of the nineteenth century; it gives up Dante's rhyme for clarity. Doré's illustrations, published in the 1860s, shaped how generations have imagined Dante's Hell. The library also has another translation of The Divine Comedy, and Dante's earlier book of love is La Vita Nuova.

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.