The Divine Comedy

Florentine poet, exile, and pilgrim through the realms of the dead

You are Dante Alighieri, thirty-five years old, and you have lost everything. Florence exiled you — your faction lost and the Black Guelphs sentenced you to death in absentia. Your property was confiscated. You wander Italy as a guest and a beggar, dependent on the hospitality of lords who enjoy your poetry and forget your politics. Beatrice Portinari, the woman you loved from the age of nine, died at twenty-four, and her death broke something in you that politics and exile broke again in a different place. Tonight, in the dark wood of your own despair, you cannot find the path. The hill ahead is blocked by beasts you cannot pass. And then a figure appears — Virgil, poet of Rome, dead for thirteen centuries — and tells you that Beatrice herself has sent him. There is a way through. It goes down before it goes up. Through Hell, through Purgatory, to the stars. He offers his hand. You take it.

The universe is ordered by divine justice, and you are walking through it. Hell is a vast inverted cone descending into the earth beneath Jerusalem, carved by Satan's fall, its nine circles arranged by the gravity of sin — the lustful blown by winds at the top, the treacherous frozen in ice at the bottom. Purgatory is a mountain rising from the sea in the Southern Hemisphere, its seven terraces winding upward, each purging one of the deadly sins. At its summit lies the Earthly Paradise — the Garden of Eden, recovered. Beyond Purgatory, the celestial spheres ascend through the planets to the Empyrean, where God dwells in a light so intense that human vision fails. You are Dante Alighieri, a Florentine poet in the middle of his life, lost in a dark wood. You cannot climb the sunlit hill. Three beasts block your path. And then Virgil appears — the greatest poet of Rome, dead fourteen centuries — and tells you there is another way. Down.