Nine Circles, Seven Terraces and One Last Vision: Walking Through Dante's Divine Comedy

In simple terms, Dante's Divine Comedy is a long Italian poem in which the poet imagines himself, lost and frightened in the middle of his life, travelling through the three realms of the dead: down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory and finally into Heaven, where he glimpses God. Read as a story, it is an adventure through the afterlife packed with real people from history and from Dante's own city of Florence. Read as an allegory, it is the journey of a soul that first learns to recognise sin, then is cleansed of it, and finally rises towards God. Written in the early 14th century, it is widely seen as the greatest work in Italian literature and one of the great works of the Western world.

Who was Dante, and when did he write it?

Dante Alighieri was a poet, writer and philosopher from Florence, born around 1265 and died in 1321. He was active in the bitter politics of his city. Florence's Guelph party split into two factions, the Whites and the Blacks, and in 1302 Dante, a White Guelph, was driven into exile. He never lived in Florence again, and that exile leaves its mark all over the poem, from prophecies of his own banishment to the damnation of some of his political enemies.

He began the poem around 1308 and finished it around 1321, shortly before his death. He spent his last years in Ravenna, where he died in September 1321 after catching malaria on the way back from a diplomatic mission to Venice. Florence later regretted exiling him and repeatedly asked for his remains. Ravenna refused, and the tomb Florence built for him in 1829 has stayed empty.

Why is it called a "comedy"?

Dante simply called his poem Comedìa. The word "Divine" was added later; the earliest known use of it comes from Giovanni Boccaccio's biography of Dante, and the full title Divina Comedia first appeared on an edition printed in Venice in 1555. In Dante's time "comedy" did not mean something funny. Ancient poems were divided into high "tragedy", serious and written in an elevated style, and low "comedy", which had a happy ending and used everyday language. The Comedy ends happily, in Heaven, and Dante wrote it not in Latin, the expected language for such a serious subject, but in the everyday Tuscan Italian of his region.

That choice had huge consequences. By writing in the vernacular, Dante helped make the Tuscan dialect the basis of standard Italian, which is why he is often called the "father" of the Italian language. The first use of terza rima, the rhyme scheme of the Comedy, is also attributed to him.

How the poem is built

The poem has 14,233 lines divided into three parts, called cantiche: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise). Each has 33 cantos, and an opening canto brings the total to exactly 100. The number three runs through everything. The verse form, terza rima, links eleven-syllable lines in interlocking groups of three that rhyme ABA, BCB, CDC and so on. Each of the three realms is arranged as nine levels plus one more: nine circles of Hell with Lucifer at the bottom, nine stages of Purgatory with the Garden of Eden on top, and nine heavens with the Empyrean, the dwelling of God, beyond them. Each of the three parts ends with the same word, stelle, "stars".

The three guides

Dante does not travel alone. The Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid, guides him through Hell and most of Purgatory and stands for human reason. Beatrice, a Florentine woman Dante had admired since childhood, takes over near the top of Purgatory and leads him through Heaven; she stands for divine revelation, faith and grace. In the final cantos the monk Bernard of Clairvaux becomes his guide, representing mystical contemplation. The handover itself carries a message: reason can take a person a long way, but not all the way.

The journey in brief

Inferno: the descent

The poem opens on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, with a line that is still famous in Italian: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, "halfway along our life's path". Dante, aged 35, is lost in a dark wood, blocked by a lion, a leopard and a she-wolf, and cannot find the straight way. Virgil rescues him and the two descend into the underworld.

Hell is a funnel of circles. The upper circles punish sins of self-indulgence, such as lust, gluttony and greed; deeper down come the violent; and at the very bottom are the fraudulent and the traitors. Limbo, the first circle, holds virtuous pagans who did not sin but never knew Christ. Each punishment fits the sin, a principle called contrapasso. Fortune-tellers, for example, must walk with their heads twisted backwards, unable to see ahead, because in life they tried to see the future.

Purgatorio: the climb

Dante and Virgil climb out on the far side of the world and reach the mountain of Purgatory, which stands on an island in the southern hemisphere; fittingly, they arrive on Easter Sunday. Its seven terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins, and here the souls are not damned but being cleansed. Dante frames these sins as forms of misdirected love: love aimed at harm (pride, envy, wrath), love that is too weak (sloth), and love that is too strong for earthly things (greed, gluttony, lust). At the summit lies the Garden of Eden, where Beatrice appears.

Paradiso: the ascent

With Beatrice, Dante rises through nine heavenly spheres, from the Moon outwards, meeting saints and theologians including Thomas Aquinas and Saint Peter. Near the end Beatrice returns to her place and Bernard guides him to the final vision. The poem ends with Dante seeing God and, in a flash of understanding he cannot put into words, his soul brought into harmony with the love of God.

What the poem is about

At its heart the Comedy is about divine justice: every soul receives the punishment or reward its life has earned. But it is also very human. Readers have long admired the way Dante brings the people he meets to life, his angry attacks on Florentine and Italian politics and the sheer power of his imagination. Love is the thread that ties it together: love gone wrong explains sin, and love perfected is what Dante finds at the end.

The poem also draws on a huge range of earlier thought. Virgil and Ovid shaped its style and stories, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas its philosophy, and the Latin Bible its language. Some scholars have argued for influence from Islamic accounts of Muhammad's night journey to heaven, but many others remain unconvinced, so this is best treated as an open debate.

Its legacy

Few books have been studied so closely: the Comedy has one of the largest traditions of commentary of any work of literature. Dante influenced English writers such as Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, and his pictures of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven fed centuries of Western art. Gustave Doré's engravings, Franz Liszt's music, Auguste Rodin's sculpture and even Hozier's 2023 album Unreal Unearth all draw on it.

If you want to try it, start with a modern translation that has notes, and read the first few cantos of Inferno slowly. Most readers find Hell the easiest part to enjoy and Paradise the hardest, so do not worry if your pace changes as you climb.

Learn with the Divine Comedy: English words and phrases

Word or phrase	Meaning	Example
an inferno	a huge, violent fire	The warehouse became an inferno.
purgatory	a period of suffering or waiting	The three-hour delay was pure purgatory.
Dantesque	grim and nightmarish, like Dante's Hell	The flooded city looked Dantesque.
to be in limbo	to be stuck, waiting for a decision	My visa application is in limbo.
abandon all hope	(humorous) give up any expectation	Abandon all hope of finding parking here.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a long wait or a stressful week, using "purgatory" and "in limbo".