The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy is, with the Bible and Shakespeare, one of the three pillars of the Western literary canon. Dante Alighieri — exiled in middle age from his native Florence and never permitted to return — spent the last twenty years of his life composing the hundred-canto poem that gathered the medieval Catholic vision of the cosmos into a single sustained narrative.

The pilgrim Dante is led by the Roman poet Virgil down through Hell, then up the mountain of Purgatory, and finally — guided by Beatrice, the beloved of his Florentine youth — through the spheres of Paradise to the Beatific Vision itself. Along the way he encounters, in unforgettable portraits, the great and the wicked dead.