The wind that froze the bottom of hell had been blowing for four years, and Branca Doria was still walking the streets of Genoa. An old man in furs, eating, sleeping, running his family’s affairs, greeting neighbors who had known him for decades—while the most famous poem in Europe circulated the news that his soul was already beneath the ice, and that the body moving through the city was a demon wearing his skin like a borrowed coat. Dante Alighieri had damned a living man, named him, spelled out the crime—a murder at a dinner table, the victim his own father-in-law—and the detail that made it almost funny, in the darkest possible way, was that Branca Doria outlived him. He died in 1325, somewhere in his nineties, four years after the poet who had consigned him to the eternal cold was in the ground.

For those four years, if you believed the poem, a devil in an old man’s shape went about his business in Genoa, and the one man who could have updated the record was dead. This was the world Dante built from exile. A poem where the damned are real people with real names, real families still living, real murders still fresh in living memory. Where a man who lost everything sat down in borrowed rooms and constructed a funnel-shaped torture chamber through the center of the earth, sorted all of human evil into nine descending circles, and filled them with his neighbors, his enemies, his teachers, two popes, and at least one man he clearly loved.

By the time the descent reaches its floor, we have watched a man gnaw the skull of the archbishop who starved his children to death in front of him, and heard that man describe it in his own words. Dante was born in Florence in 1265 under the sign of Gemini, as he liked to remind people. The Alighieri were minor nobility, old enough blood to matter in Florence, not rich enough to be dangerous. His mother died when he was a boy, his father remarried and died while Dante was still in his teens, leaving him at eighteen effectively an orphan with a name to maintain in the most feverish, ambitious, self-devouring city in Europe.

Florence was rich in a way that alarmed everyone, including the Florentines themselves. Banking, wool, trade, the gold florin becoming the standard coin of Europe. The towers of great families stood over the streets like a stone forest, and Florentine political disputes ended with houses burned, exiles by the hundreds, and severed heads. The two great factions were the Guelphs, who broadly backed the Pope, and the Ghibellines, who broadly backed the Holy Roman Emperor, though on the ground the labels mostly tracked family feuds that had been running for generations.

When one side won, the other side lost everything. Homes demolished, property confiscated, whole clans marched out of the gates. Two things happened to young Dante that shaped all the rest. The first was a girl.

At a May feast when he was nine, he saw an eight-year-old named Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a wealthy banker, dressed in crimson, and by his own account something in him simply changed and never changed back. They were never together. She married a banker. He married Gemma Donati, from a powerful family, in a match arranged when he was a child.

Then in 1290, Beatrice died at twenty-four, and Dante poured his grief into a strange little book called the Vita Nuova, closing it with a promise that sounded like a young man’s bravado and turned out to be a construction plan: he hoped to say of her what had never been said of any woman. Twenty years later, he made her a resident of the highest heaven and built a hundred cantos of poetry as a road to reach her. The second thing was politics, and it destroyed his life. Florence required anyone holding public office to enroll in a guild, so Dante, a poet and scholar, joined the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries, a guild that also covered booksellers, and worked his way up through the councils of the city.

He fought as a young cavalryman at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289. By the summer of 1300, at thirty-five, he was one of the six priors governing Florence. He would later write that all his miseries and misfortunes had their cause and beginning in that election. By then the Guelphs, having no Ghibellines left to fight, had split into the Whites and the Blacks.

The Blacks, gathered around the ferocious Donati clan, wanted alliance with the papacy. The Whites, and Dante with them, wanted Florence to govern itself. During his two months as prior, street fighting broke out and the priors banished ringleaders from both sides. Among the exiled Whites was Guido Cavalcanti, the finest poet in Florence and Dante’s closest friend.

Guido caught malaria in the swampy exile town and came home to die that August. Dante’s brief turn at power involved signing off on the banishment that killed his best friend. The Pope then was Boniface VIII, and Dante hated this man with a purity of hatred that most of us never achieve about anything. Boniface wanted Tuscany, wanted Florence’s banks and obedience.

In the autumn of 1301, as his agent Charles of Valois approached Florence with troops, the city sent a small embassy to Rome. Dante was one of the ambassadors. Boniface kept him hanging around Rome while the trap closed at home. Charles entered Florence on November 1, 1301, and within days the Black exiles poured back, and for something like a week the city belonged to the mob.

Houses of White families burned, men murdered in the streets, while the peacemaker did nothing. Dante never went home. On January 27, 1302, the new government condemned him in absence on charges of corruption, extortion, and opposition to the Pope. On March 10, a second sentence came down: if Dante Alighieri ever again came within the power of the commune of Florence, he was to be burned with fire until he died.

Igne comburatur sic quoad moriatur. He was thirty-six, a husband and father, one of the most celebrated poets in Italy, and from that morning until his last breath nineteen years later, walking through the gate of his own city meant the stake. Everything that follows comes out of that sentence. The Inferno is many things—a theological system, a map of the afterlife, a summary of everything a brilliant medieval mind knew.

Underneath all of it, it is the revenge of a man who could never go home. He wandered court to court, patron to patron, learning how salty another man’s bread tastes, and somewhere around 1306 or 1308 he started writing a poem in which he personally walks through hell and finds out where everybody went. He gave himself the power of the Last Judgment, and he used it, name by name. The poem opens with the most famous midlife crisis ever recorded.

Midway through the road of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. He is thirty-five, lost in sin and error. When he tries to climb out toward a sunlit hill, three beasts block him, and the wolf drives him back down. Then help arrives in the strangest form: Virgil, the Roman poet, dead thirteen hundred years, Dante’s literary idol.

Virgil explains that a lady came down from heaven to the edge of hell to ask him to rescue Dante. Beatrice. The dead girl from the May feast. Since Dante cannot take the direct path, he must go the long way, down through hell, through the entire body of human evil, out the far side, up the mountain of Purgatory, and only then to her.

The descent begins at a gate, and the gate speaks. Nine lines carved over the arch: Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way to the eternal pain, through me the way among the lost people. Justice moved my high maker. I was made by divine power, by highest wisdom, and by primal love.

Before me nothing was created except eternal things, and I endure eternally. Then the last line, the one everybody knows: Abandon every hope, you who enter. Virgil takes his hand and walks him in among the secret things. What hits first is sound.

Sighs, wails, shrieks echoing under a sky with no stars, voices in every language, the slap of hands striking themselves. These are the neutrals, the uncommitted, who never chose anything, mixed among them the angels who sat out the war in heaven, loyal only to themselves. Heaven expelled them so as not to be less beautiful, and hell will not accept them either because the wicked might otherwise have someone to feel superior to. An enormous blank banner rushes in a circle, behind it a train of souls so long Dante says he would never have believed death had undone so many.

They are naked, stung by wasps and hornets, blood running down to their feet where fat worms collect it. In life they followed nothing, so now they chase a blank flag forever. Past the neutrals runs the Acheron, the first river. Charon the ferryman comes screaming, Woe to you, wicked souls, never hope to see the sky, then spots the one warm body in the crowd and stops: You there, living soul, get away from these who are dead.

Virgil settles it with a formula he will use at every checkpoint: This is willed where what is willed can be done, and ask no more. The souls gather to the bank anyway, because divine justice spurs them so that fear converts to desire. The damned long for their own punishment the way a falling man longs for the ground. Then the dark plain shakes, an earthquake rolls through the ground, and Dante faints and falls like a man seized by sleep.

He wakes on the far side of the river, on the brink of the abyss itself, looking down into a valley of pain so deep nothing can be made out in the bottom. Virgil has gone pale, and Dante calls it out. The answer is one of the quiet heartbreaks of the poem: The anguish of the people down there paints my face with the pity you mistake for fear. The first circle is Limbo, and nothing here screams.

Only sighs, rising from crowds of men, women, and children who did not sin. Some were infants who died before baptism; the rest lived before Christ or beyond the reach of the faith. However great their virtue, they lacked the one door in. Virgil says the line that defines the whole circle: We live in longing without hope, desiring forever something we know with certainty we will never have.

Among the great dead on the green grass, the four great poets—Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan—make Dante the sixth of their company. Around them sit the philosophers, and at their center the master of those who know, Aristotle, with Socrates and Plato nearest him, and beside them Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Averroes. Two Muslim scholars seated among the immortals by a Christian poet whose civilization was actively crusading against theirs. Nobody is being punished here in any visible way.

That is what makes Limbo hurt. At the entrance to the second circle stands Minos, the intake clerk of hell, a snarling horror with a long tail. Every soul comes before him and tells everything, and Minos wraps his tail around himself, and the number of coils is the number of the circle. The souls are flung down to their place.

This is the circle of the lustful, swept forever by an infernal hurricane because in life they let passion sweep them wherever it went. Among the thousands tumbled separately through the gale, one pair moves side by side, inseparable even here. Dante calls out into the storm, and they come like doves gliding out of the dark air. Her name was Francesca da Polenta, and she was real.

Daughter of the Lord of Ravenna, born around 1255 into a dynasty at war with the Malatesta of Rimini. Around 1275 the two houses sealed a peace the standard way, with a bride. Francesca, about twenty, would marry the heir of the Malatesta, Giovanni, called Gianciotto, crippled John—a formidable soldier, lame or deformed in some way the sources never quite specify. He had a younger brother, Paolo, called Il Bello, the beautiful.

Boccaccio tells the version everyone remembers: the Polenta family feared Francesca would refuse the crippled groom, so they sent handsome Paolo to conduct the marriage by proxy, and nobody told the bride. She saw Paolo, was told this is your husband, and learned the truth the morning after the wedding. It ended somewhere between 1283 and 1285. Gianciotto caught them together in her bedchamber and killed them both with his own hands, sword through both bodies.

He faced no charge, no penalty. A husband’s rights covered it completely. He remarried, prospered, died in his bed decades later, an honored man. The lovers got a shared grave and a scandal that curdled into a cautionary tale.

She speaks first, gracious in a way nothing in hell has prepared us for. She tells her story in three movements, each beginning with the word love. Love seized him. Love seized me.

Love brought us to one death. Nowhere is there a person who chose anything. She is quoting, almost verbatim, the doctrines of the courtly love poetry Dante himself wrote as a young man, deploying that poetry as her defense counsel. Then she answers his question with the lines that made her immortal: No greater sorrow than to remember the happy time in misery.

One day for pleasure, we were going through the story of Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone, suspecting nothing. Several times the story lifted our eyes to meet, but one point alone defeated us. When we came to how the longed-for smile was kissed by such a lover, this one, who will never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling.

The book was our Galehaut, and he who wrote it. That day we went no further in it. Paolo beside her never says one word, weeping forever, an arm’s length from the woman he died with. And Dante, for pity, faints as if he were dying and falls as a dead body falls.

When he comes to, he is in the third circle, the circle of the gluttons, under eternal rain of hail and filthy water falling onto ground that putrefies under it. The gluttons lie blind and prone in the slush, and over them stands Cerberus, three-headed, with a greasy black beard, clawed human hands with which he seizes the spirits, flays them, and tears them limb from limb. Virgil scoops up two fistfuls of stinking mud and hurls them into the three gullets, and the monster falls silent, choking down filth. Out of the muck one shade sits up, a Florentine named Ciacco, which means hog.

He delivers the first prophecy of the night. After long contention, your city will come to blood, and the Whites will drive out the Blacks with much offense. Then within three suns the fallen side will rise, through the power of one who tarries offshore—Boniface—and the Blacks will keep the Whites under heavy burdens, however they weep and rage. Dante is hearing the destruction of his own life recited by a dead glutton two years before it happens.

Then Ciacco’s eyes slide out of focus, and he collapses back down among the other blind ones. The fourth circle holds the avaricious and the prodigal, two vast mobs shoving enormous weights around the circle, crashing into each other, screaming Why do you hoard and why do you squander? The hoarders are clerics, Virgil confirms—priests, popes, and cardinals, so filthy now that they are too dark to recognize. Avarice erases the face.

Then Virgil gives a small lecture on Fortune, the goddess these people wasted their lives fighting. She is a blessed angelic intelligence appointed by God to move the empty goods of the world, turning her sphere in bliss. The exile who lost his whole fortune to a political spin of that wheel wrote her the kindest portrait in his hell. The fifth circle is the Styx, a marsh where the wrathful tear each other apart piecemeal with their teeth.

Beneath the fighters, completely submerged, lie the sullen, the passively wrathful, gurgling a hymn they can never get out, audible only as bubbles in the mud. Phlegyas ferries the poets across, and midway a soul rises and grabs the gunwale. It is Filippo Argenti, a black Guelph of the faction that profited when Dante fell, whose family took Dante’s confiscated house, and who, by one story, had once slapped Dante across the face in public. Dante knows exactly who he is and spits on him, verbally, with force.

Virgil shoves the shade off and then turns and embraces Dante, kisses his face, and blesses him for the cruelty. And when Dante asks to see him dunked before they leave, the muddy crowds fall on the man together, and Dante watches his enemy torn apart while the poets sail on, satisfied. Ahead, the city of Dis rises out of the marsh, red as if it had come out of fire. At the gate, more than a thousand demons rain down, fallen angels, screaming Who is this who without death goes through the kingdom of the dead?

Virgil goes forward alone to negotiate, and the demons slam the gate in his face. On the tower above, the Furies rise, tearing their own breasts, and call for Medusa. Virgil spins Dante around bodily and claps his own hands over the pilgrim’s closed eyes. One glance and the journey ends here.

Then the siege breaks like weather. Across the marsh comes a figure walking with dry feet, waving the thick air away from his face with his left hand, full of disdain. One sent from heaven. He touches the gate with a little wand, and it simply opens, before the garrison of a thousand demons has evaporated.

Inside, the sixth circle spreads out as a great plain of burning tombs, lids propped open, flames heating every sarcophagus hot. These are the heretics, and the particular tenants of this neighborhood are the Epicureans, who make the soul die with the body. They get graves that never stop. Out of one tomb a torso rises, upright, chest and forehead lifted, as if he held hell itself in great contempt.

Farinata degli Uberti. This is the most feared Florentine of the previous century, the man whose battle their grandfathers survived or did not. In September 1260, at Monteperti, his Ghibelline army slaughtered the Florentine Guelphs, something like ten thousand dead, fifteen thousand prisoners, the Arbia running red. And then, one year later, at the council of Empoli, when the victorious league voted to raze Florence, he stood alone against the entire congress and said he had endured every hardship of exile and war for one reason only, to live in his own city, and he would defend it with his own sword if necessary, alone.

Florence stood. The man in the tomb carries both titles at once, butcher of the city and its sole savior. He and Dante trade insults about their families, and then the lid of the tomb moves and a second figure rises, a kneeling shade that looks around Dante, searching the air at his side for someone else, and finding no one, breaks into weeping. Where is my son?

And why is he not with you? This is Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, and his son is Guido, Dante’s best friend, the man whose banishment Dante signed as prior, the banishment into the malarial swamp. Dante answers with a sentence built like a trap: one whom perhaps your Guido held in disdain. Held, past tense.

The father seizes on the grammar like a drowning man. Does he not live still? And Dante hesitates, just a beat. The old man, watching that pause, does the desperate math and falls backward into the burning tomb.

Guido was alive in April 1300, the date of the journey. He had four more months. He died that August. The audience watches two ignorant men grieve across a misunderstanding, with the real death hanging four months out.

Farinata, who has not moved through any of it, resumes the previous conversation at the exact syllable where it broke, and before Dante leaves, he delivers the prophecy: You will learn, before fifty months have filled the moon’s face, how heavy that art of returning is. After the last armed attempt of the White exiles fell apart in blood in the summer of 1304, no road home existed at all. Below the sixth circle, the stench of the seventh rises to meet them. The way down is a broken scree, and on top of it lies the Minotaur, biting himself.

Past him runs the Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood. This is the ring of the violent against their neighbors, and each soul stands in the boiling blood at the level of the harm they did. The tyrants are into the eyebrows. Plain murderers to the throat.

Centaurs patrol the bank, arrows knocked, and any soul that rises further than its sin allows takes an arrow. Nessus carries Dante across the ford and conducts a tour of the deep end: Alexander, Dionysius, Ezzelino da Romano, Obizzo d’Este, smothered by his own stepson, and Guy de Montfort, who stabbed his cousin at the altar in Viterbo at the elevation of the host and dragged the body out by the hair. Beyond the blood river, the landscape closes over them. A wood with no green anywhere, and nesting in the branches the Harpies.

Wails come from everywhere and no people. Virgil tells Dante to break off any little branch, and when he does, the trunk cries out, Why do you tear me? Blood wells up around the break, and the voice belongs to one of the most spectacular ruins of the century. Pier delle Vigna, chancellor of the Emperor Frederick II, the man who held both keys of Frederick’s heart.

In 1249 he was arrested at Cremona on charges of treason, paraded in chains through the cities he had governed, and blinded with hot irons. In the spring of that year at San Miniato, he killed himself, running his head against the stone until his skull gave way. He accepts the sentence of hell—the suicide—and in the same breath swears he never broke faith with his lord, and begs Dante to comfort his memory, to clear his name. He explains the mechanics of this forest, and they are worse than the forest.

A suicide in this wood can only speak while being injured. And on the last day, when every other soul reclaims its body, the suicides alone will be refused. Each retrieved corpse will be hung in the wood on the thorns of its own shadow tree, swinging forever, rooted below, staring up at the body it threw away. The wood explodes.

Two naked men burst past, torn and bleeding, and behind them the hunt—black bitches, ravenous, running like greyhounds slipped off the chain. The second man flags and hides in a bush, and the dogs tear him apart piece by piece, carrying off the still-suffering limbs. The bush he hid in weeps blood from every broken stem. It was a person, an anonymous Florentine suicide, who identifies himself only by his city and his end: I made myself a gibbet of my own house.

Past the wood, a plane of sand, and on it fire is falling in broad flakes, slowly, like snow on a windless day. Three sins against God share this ring: the blasphemers lie supine, forced to face the heaven they insulted; the usurers crouch at the sand’s edge, identifiable only by the purses hung from their necks, painted with the coat of arms of the great banking families of Florence and Padua; and the sodomites walk without rest, beating the fresh flames from their own bodies. One figure among the supine, twisted and scornful of the fire, roars a challenge at heaven. This is Capaneus, still insulting the god who struck him down.

Virgil turns on him: in that your pride remains unquenched, you are punished the more. The fire is set dressing. The man’s real punishment is his own personality, fully preserved. Along the stone margin of the stream that crosses the sand, a shade catches up to them, peers up through the scorched air at Dante, and takes hold of the hem of his garment.

What a marvel. And Dante, staring down at the burned face, finds he knows it, and the recognition cracks him open: Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto? Are you here, ser Brunetto? Brunetto Latini was, for Florence, what a founding intellectual is for a young country.

Notary, statesman, philosopher, ambassador, one of the men who taught the Florentine Republic how to speak. The chronicler Villani wrote that Brunetto was the beginner and master in refining the Florentines, in teaching them to speak well and guide the Republic. Dante addresses him with the honorific ser, and with voi, the plural of respect he grants to almost no one in all of hell. And he tells him to his face: In my memory is fixed the dear, kind, paternal image of you, when in the world, hour by hour, you taught me how man makes himself eternal.

Because the sodomite’s sentence forbids stillness, the old man walks in the fire while Dante walks the safe margin above, head bent like a man walking in reverence. Brunetto prophesies Dante’s exile in the warmest terms anyone in hell will use: If you follow your star, you cannot fail of a glorious port. And then, with an old politician’s venom: That ungrateful, malignant people, descended from the ancient quarrymen of Fiesole, will make themselves your enemy for your good deeds. Both parties will hunger for you, but the grass shall be far from the goat.

He asks only that his book be commended to the world, and then he sees a new group approaching with whom he is forbidden to mingle, and runs to rejoin his own. Dante watches his teacher go, and describes him like one of those who race for the green cloth that Verona gives through the open field, and of them he seemed the one who wins, and not the one who loses. Getting down to the eighth circle requires the strangest taxi ride in literature. Virgil flings a cord over the cliff edge, and something answers the signal, swimming up through the black air as a diver comes up who has gone down to free an anchor.

It is Geryon, the image of fraud itself: the face of a just man, gracious, benign, honest, and behind it a serpent’s body painted with knots and little wheels, and at the end of it a scorpion’s tail, the sting you never see until you are aboard. Virgil seats himself on the monster’s shoulders and orders Dante on in front of him, placing his own body between the pilgrim and the tail. Geryon backs off the ledge like a boat backing out of its berth, and begins an enormous slow spiral down through the void, the wind in Dante’s face and the roar of the waterfall of blood rising from the deep. The eighth circle is called Malebolge, the evil ditches, a vast sloping plane cut into ten enormous concentric trenches, ten separate species of fraud, ten distinct industrial-scale punishments running side by side.

Fraud gets ten subdivisions where violence got three, and that ratio is the poem’s whole moral thesis in a single piece of city planning. Dante had watched violence all his life and survived it. What destroyed him, what destroyed Florence, was fraud, the weaponized mind, and he built it a metropolis. The first ditch holds the panders and seducers, whipped along forever by horned demons.

Venedico Caccianemico, who sold his own sister to the pleasure of a marquis. Jason, who seduced and abandoned Hypsipyle and Medea, passing under the lash holding the bearing of a king. The second ditch is a river of human excrement, and in it, submerged and gasping, are the flatterers. Alessio Interminei of Lucca, beating his own crusted scalp.

Thais the harlot, scratching herself with dungy nails. The third ditch is drilled with round holes, and from every hole protrude legs, feet on fire, the souls stuffed upside down like posts. These are the simoniacs, the churchmen who bought and sold the offices of God, who spent their lives with heads bowed to earthly money, so now they are planted head-down with their feet offered up to the sky. One pair of legs outthrashes every other, and when Dante addresses them, the voice from inside the rock says: Are you standing there already, Boniface?

This is Pope Nicholas III, dead in 1280, and he has been waiting for his replacement. The mechanics of this hole are the cruelest joke in the circle: each hole belongs to a line of succession, and when the next simoniac pope dies, he drops headfirst into the same hole, hammering his predecessor deeper into the rock, taking over the burning feet position. Here is Boniface’s hole, reserved, occupied by a tenant expecting him by name, and the poem has just damned a sitting pope with a punctuality joke. Then Dante does something he has done nowhere else in hell.

Standing over the burning feet, the exiled layman preaches to a pope, a sermon that must have curled the parchment. Tell me, how much treasure did our Lord demand of Saint Peter before he put the keys in his keeping? Surely he asked nothing except, Follow me. And were it not for the reverence I still bear the supreme keys you held in the glad life, I would use words heavier still, for your avarice grieves the world.

Virgil, listening, wears a look of such contentment that he picks Dante up bodily, hugs him to his chest, and carries him up the crag like a trophy. The fourth ditch holds the diviners, the soothsayers and astrologers, every head wrenched around 180 degrees on the neck, forced to walk backward looking at where they have been. They strained to see too far ahead, so now they see only the past. And the tears run down the spine and between the buttocks.

Dante, seeing the human image so contorted, breaks down and weeps, and receives for it the harshest rebuke of the journey. Virgil rounds on him: Are you also one of the fools? Here pity lives when it is quite dead. Who is more criminal than he who feels passion at the divine judgment?

The fifth ditch is where the Inferno turns into a black comedy, and the shift is so abrupt that scholars have argued it must be deliberate. The trench is filled bank to bank with boiling pitch, and it is the ditch of the barrators, the sellers of public office and justice—the exact crime named in Dante’s own indictment of 1302. Watch what he does with it. He writes the barrators’ trench as the longest, rowdiest, most contemptuous episode of the poem, two full cantos of demons and pratfalls, the demon squad named the Malebranche, all filthy puns.

He writes himself walking through the ditch of his alleged crime untouched, terrified, but innocent, while the demons of civic corruption rage around him on their own leashes. A demon named Graffiacane hooks a sinner by the tarred hair and hauls him up onto the bank. The interrogation proceeds with the hooks literally in him. He is a Navarrese court fixer, and he starts selling: he can produce Italians for the hooks if the demons will stand back a little.

The demons argue themselves into position, and the moment their eyes leave him, the sinner plants his feet and dives, an arrow of tar under the pitch. Two demons, clawing each other in midair, drop together into the boiling pitch, caught like sparrowhawks in birdlime, and the demons have to rescue their own men off the surface of their own instrument of torture. In the confusion, the two poets slip away, and the demons cannot follow, because the providence that gave them the fifth ditch as ministers denies them all power to leave it. Safe in the sixth ditch, the fugitives land among the slowest procession in hell.

These are the hypocrites, walking forever in cloaks of gilded gold on the outside, and inside solid lead, the heaviest material the medieval world worked with, poured thick. Beautiful on the outside by profession, dead weight within. One of them is Caiaphas, crucified across the path on three stakes, and every hypocrite in the ditch treads across his body, and he must feel, the poem specifies, how much each one weighs. He counseled the Pharisees that it was expedient to put one man to torment for the people, so now he lies where the many walk and bears the weight of every gilded fraud in history.

Virgil stands marveling over him, because Virgil died before the crucifixion, and in all his previous tours of hell this exhibit was not here. The seventh ditch is floored with serpents, and through them run the naked terrified thieves. Their hands are tied behind their backs with living snakes. A serpent strikes one of them, and the man ignites, burns, collapses into a pile of ash, and then the ash gathers itself and rises, resuming the shape of the man, who stands up dazed.

Combustion, ash, reassembly, running on demand. The reassembled man is Vanni Fucci of Pistoia, a professional thug and church robber who once watched an innocent man nearly hang for his crime. And after he prophesies Dante’s ruin to his face for the pure pleasure of the pain it would cause, he does the thing this canto exists to record. He raises both fists, thumb thrust between the fingers, and screams at the sky: Take that, God.

I square them at you. The most direct blasphemy in the entire poem. From that moment on, Dante says, the serpents were my friends. A snake whips around his neck, another binds his arms, and the man who a breath ago was challenging heaven cannot move a finger.

Then the poets watch the finest-machined contrapasso in the poem. A six-legged serpent launches itself onto one of three Florentine thieves and begins to merge with him, ivy never rooted itself to a tree the way the beast entwined its limbs through his, the two heads flowing into one, two and none, moving off across the ditch. Moments later, a small blazing serpent strikes a second thief at the navel, and smoke pours from the man’s wound and from the serpent’s mouth, and the two smokes meet, and they exchange forms, organ by organ, the man’s legs fusing into a tail, the serpent’s tail splitting into legs. These men spent their lives dissolving the boundary between mine and yours, so the boundary between self and other is dissolved in them.

A thief here cannot keep possession of the one thing that was ever truly his, his own form. The eighth ditch is filled with individual flames, thousands of them, moving along the bottom of the trench, as many as the fireflies the peasant sees on a summer evening. Inside every one of those pretty lights, a man is burning, hidden forever. These are the counselors of fraud, who worked hidden, moving others while staying unseen, so now they burn hidden.

One flame comes divided at the top, and inside it are tormented Ulysses and Diomedes, paying jointly for the stratagems that broke Troy. And the flame tells a story that is not in Homer. When I departed from Circe, neither fondness for my son nor duty to my aged father nor the old love that should have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me the ardor to gain experience of the world and of human vices and worth. He put out onto the open sea with one ship and the little company that had never deserted him, old men now, and coasted the Mediterranean until they came to the narrow strait where Hercules planted his pillars as a warning.

And there, to his shrunken, exhausted crew, Ulysses gave the little speech that has launched actual expeditions, that explorers have quoted in their diaries: Brothers, who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the west, to this so brief a vigil of the senses that remains to us, do not deny the experience of the unpeopled world behind the sun. Consider your seed. You were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge. With that little speech, he says, I made my companions so keen for the voyage that I could hardly have held them back afterward.

And turning our stern to the morning, we made wings of our oars for the mad flight. Five months they ran south across the empty ocean, and then a mountain appeared, dark with distance, higher than any mountain he had ever seen. We rejoiced, and quickly the rejoicing turned to weeping. A whirlwind rose and struck the forepart of the ship.

Three times it whirled her round. At the fourth, it lifted the stern on high and plunged the prow below, until the sea had closed over us. The speech about virtue and knowledge is the noblest thing anyone says in hell, and the man who says it is in hell, burning in a fire shaped like a tongue. Another flame hurries toward the bridge, making a confused roaring at its tip.

The voice asks in Romagnol for news of Romagna. This is Guido da Montefeltro, the greatest soldier of his generation, a Ghibelline captain whose genius ran to stratagem. His deeds, he tells Dante, were those of the fox and not the lion. Old, he entered the Franciscan order, a real conversion.

And then the great priest Boniface came to him in his friary, waging war against the Colonna family, and asked for one last piece of professional advice: how to take their fortress at Palestrina. Guido refused. Then Boniface made the offer: Heaven I can lock and unlock. Mine are the two keys.

Absolve me in advance, Guido answered, and I will tell you. And the Pope did. Absolution granted before the sin, as payment for the sin. And Guido gave him the counsel: Promise much, deliver little.

Offer generous terms, and once they walk out of the fortress, take everything. It worked. And when Guido died, he tells Dante, Francis himself came for his friar, and found a black cherub already standing over the deathbed. The demon’s argument is the finest piece of legal reasoning in the poem: One cannot be absolved without repenting, and one cannot repent a thing and will it at the same time.

The pardon was void the moment it was issued. Oh, wretched me. How I shuddered when he seized me and said, Perhaps you did not consider that I am a logician. The ninth ditch is introduced with a page of battlefield accounting.

Gather all the dead of all the wars ever fought across southern Italy, and it would be nothing beside the spectacle of this ditch. A man walks into view, split open from the chin down to the place where wind is broken, his entrails hanging between his legs. This is the ditch of the sowers of discord, and a demon with a sword opens them according to the division they made in the world, and the wounds close as they walk the circuit, so that they arrive back at the blade and are opened afresh, forever. The first to speak is Muhammad, cleft from chin to scalp, a document of what a Florentine of 1300 believed and of how far a great poem can carry its author’s blind spots.

Behind him come the Italians. Pier da Medicina, his throat pierced through, speaking through the bloody hole. Curio, the tongue that launched the civil wars, now mute. And a figure with both hands lopped off, raising the stumps into the dark air so the blood falls down his own face.

Remember Mosca too, who said, Alas, a thing done has an end—the words that split Florence into Guelph and Ghibelline in the first place. And then Dante sees a thing he refuses to describe until he has sworn to it. A trunk without a head walking with the others, holding the severed head by the hair swinging from its hand like a lantern. Of itself it made for itself a lamp.

The head speaks: I am Bertrand de Born, the one who gave the young king the evil encouragements, who set Prince Henry against his own father. And because I parted persons so joined, I carry my brain parted from its root in this trunk. Thus you observe in me the counter-suffering. The only time in the whole hundred cantos the word is spoken, and Dante gives it to a severed head explaining its own case law.

The tenth and final ditch is a hospital. In the dark bottom lie the falsifiers, and their sentence employs no torturer, no demon. Just corruption itself turned loose in their bodies, rotting eternally. The alchemists are covered in furious scab, clawing themselves like a stable boy currying a horse.

The falsifiers of persons run through the ditch in slavering rabies fits, biting whatever they catch. And the counterfeiters of coin suffer dropsy: Master Adam, who forged the gold florin of Florence at twenty-one carats instead of twenty-four, and was burned alive for it. His speech is the thirstiest poetry ever written. In life I had all I wished, and now I long for one drop of water.

The little brooks that run down the green hills of the Casentino stand always before me, and the image of them parches me more than the disease that wastes my face. When the swollen coiner and the fevered Greek Sinon fall to insulting each other, one punching the drum-tight paunch so it booms, Dante stands rooted like a man at a cockfight until Virgil turns on him with real anger: The wish to hear such baseness is itself a base wish. Beyond the tenth ditch, out of the dimness comes a sound that outrares any thunder, a horn blast, and looming through the murk, what look like towers. Those are not towers, Virgil says.

They are giants standing in the central well, planted around its rim from the navel down. The horn blower is Nimrod, builder of the Tower of Babel, speaking a language that belongs to no language. Further along stands Ephialtes, wound around five times with an enormous chain, and when he shakes, the whole giant convulsing so violently that Dante says he never feared death more. The taxi service at the bottom of the universe is provided by Antaeus, the one giant who stayed out of the war against heaven, susceptible to flattery.

The hands that once wrestled Hercules take up two poets and lower them gently, like cargo, down the inner face of the well to the floor of the universe. And the floor is ice. Cocytus, the last river of hell, into which all the waters of all the circles drain and freeze, with a wind so absolute that the lake has the look of glass. The ninth circle holds the traitors, frozen into the lake in concentric zones.

In the outermost zone, Caina, named for Cain, lie the traitors to their own kindred, locked in the ice up to the line of the face, teeth chattering, tears freezing in the very eyes that made them. Two shades pressed so close that their hair mingles are the Alberti brothers, who murdered each other over an inheritance and whose own weeping has welded them together face to face. Deeper in, the second zone, Antenora, holds the traitors to party and homeland. And here the pilgrim commits the cruelest act of his whole journey.

Walking among the dog-like faces frozen in the lake, Dante’s foot strikes one of the heads hard. Whether will or fate or chance, he says, leaving the question open. The head weeps and screams up at him: Why do you trample me? Unless you come to increase the vengeance for Monteperti.

Dante stoops, seizes the frozen scalp by the hair, and begins tearing it out in fistfuls. You will name yourself, he says, or not one hair remains on you. The head refuses. A neighbor, annoyed by the noise, settles it: What ails you, Bocca, is the chattering of your jaws not music enough?

Bocca degli Abati. At the crisis of Monteperti, a Ghibelline planted inside the Guelph army, riding beside the standard-bearer of the Florentine cavalry, had drawn his sword and hacked off the man’s hand at the wrist—the hand that held the standard. The flag went down, the line convulsed, and the rout began. Ten thousand men butchered in the collapse one act of treachery had triggered.

And then, a little further on, Dante sees the thing the whole descent has been narrowing toward. Two heads frozen in one hole, and the upper one is eating the lower. Teeth set into the base of the skull, gnawing as a starving man gnaws bread. Dante stands over it and makes the offer: Tell me who you are, and if your complaint is just, I will repay you in the world telling it.

The eater lifts his mouth from the ruined skull and wipes his lips on the hair of the head he has been chewing. You ask me to renew a desperate grief that crushes my heart merely to think of. But if my words are to be seed bearing the fruit of infamy for the traitor I gnaw, you will see me speak and weep together. Then Count Ugolino della Gherardesca tells his story.

Pisa in the 1280s was a maritime republic in free fall. In August 1284, the Genoese destroyed its navy at Meloria, thousands of men killed, thousands more carried off to Genoese prisons, so many that a saying went around Italy: if you want to see Pisa, go to Genoa. In that emergency, power gathered into the hands of Count Ugolino, head of one of Pisa’s greatest families, already trailing a career of flexible loyalties. The man who profited from his maneuvering was the archbishop, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, who played the count and his own grandson against each other, posed as his ally, and then turned.

On the first of July 1288, mobs stormed through Pisa. Ugolino’s palace was attacked and burned. A natural son and a grandson were killed in the fighting, and the count was taken, along with two of his sons and two of his grandsons. Five males of one house, seized together.

The youngest, Anselmuccio, was a boy in his early teens at most. In March of 1289, on the archbishop’s authority, the door of their tower was nailed shut and the keys thrown into the Arno. No sentence recited. The five prisoners were simply left.

Nine days, the chroniclers estimated. When the Pisans unsealed the door, they took out five bodies, the starvation so advanced that the dead could barely be handled, and buried the count with the irons still on him, because no one troubled to strike the chains off a corpse. Now hear how the man in the ice tells it. A narrow slit in the tower had already shown him several moons, before the bad dream came.

He dreamed of a hunt, a wolf and its whelps on the mountain between Pisa and Lucca, the hounds running in the pack—the Gualandi, the Sismondi, the Lanfranchi, the very families of his captors. He woke before dawn, and heard in the dark of the actual tower his actual children crying in their sleep, asking for bread. Then they were awake, and the hour approached when food was usually brought, and from below came the sound: I heard them nailing shut the door of the horrible tower. I looked into the faces of my sons without a word.

I did not weep. I turned to stone inside. They wept, and my little Anselm said, You look so, Father. What is wrong?

I shed no tear for all that, nor answered all that day, nor the night after, until the next sun came out over the world. When a little ray found its way into the doleful prison, and I saw in four faces my own aspect, I bit both my hands for grief. And they, thinking I did it from hunger, rose up and said, Father, it will hurt us far less if you eat of us. You clothed us in this wretched flesh, and yours it is to strip it away.

On the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself down at his father’s feet: My father, why do you not help me? And died there. And as you see me, I saw the three fall one by one between the fifth day and the sixth. And I, already blind, took to groping over each of them.

And I called them for two days after they were dead. Then he ends the story with the line seven centuries have never stopped arguing about: Then fasting had more power than grief. The plain sense: grief had not killed him, and hunger did. And underneath it, the other sense has never stopped whispering, that in the final days, blind and mad, the man did what his children had begged him to do.

The poem does not say it. The poem places him in hell, gnawing eternally on a skull, and lets the image argue with the words forever. The count finishes speaking, and the poem reports: when he had said this, with eyes twisted sideways, he took the wretched skull in his teeth again, strong upon the bone like a dog’s. The archbishop, underneath, is granted no speech, not one word.

The man of God who starved children is reduced forever to food that feels. Then Dante turns from the frozen pair and delivers one of the great curses in literature: Ah Pisa, shame of the peoples of the fair land where sea is spoken, let the islands of Capraia and Gorgona dam up the mouth of the Arno and drown every soul in you. For if Count Ugolino carried the name of betraying your castles, you had no right to put his children on such a cross. Their young age made them innocent.

Past the gnawing pair, the ice enters its third zone, Tolomea, named for treachery against guests, people who killed the ones they had welcomed under their own roofs, at their own tables. The weeping freezes across the sockets into a visor of ice, sealing the eyes like crystal spectacles, the grief turning back inward, crying into a blocked drain forever. Out of the ice a voice cries for help: lift the hard veils from my face that I may vent the grief that stuffs my heart a little before the weeping freezes over. Dante answers with an offer sworn on his own journey: if I do not extricate you, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.

The voice identifies itself: I am Friar Alberigo, he of the fruits of the evil garden. In 1285 he had settled a family quarrel by inviting his kinsman to a reconciliation banquet, and at the end of the meal called out, Bring the fruit. The signal. Armed men came out from behind the hangings and butchered the guests at the table.

Then Dante asks the question whose answer opens a trapdoor under everything: Are you dead already, then? For as far as the pilgrim knows, Alberigo is alive. And the friar replies: How my body stands up in the world, I carry no knowledge of. Such is the privilege of this Tolomea that oftentimes the soul falls down here before Atropos has cut the thread.

The moment a person commits this sin, the soul drops instantly into the ice, and a demon takes the vacated body and operates it for the remainder of its natural span, eating, drinking, sleeping, wearing the face. His neighbor in the ice, Alberigo continues, has wintered here for years already. Sir Branca Doria of Genoa, who invited his own father-in-law to dinner and had him hacked apart at the table. His soul arrived in the ice before his victim’s had even reached the boiling pitch.

Dante flat-out refuses to believe it. Branca Doria is not dead at all. He eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes. And the friar simply reinstates the mechanism.

And events sided with the friar in a way even Dante could not have arranged, because the living Branca Doria walked the streets of Genoa for twenty-five years after the poem’s journey, and for four years after its author’s death. Then, the interview over, the friar begs: Open my eyes now. And the poem admits: And I did not open them for him. And to be rude to him was courtesy.

He swore the oath, collected the testimony, and walked away, and tells us to our faces that cheating a traitor is good manners. Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni, Virgil says. The banners of the king of hell advance. Ahead, through the cold air, a structure looms the way a windmill looms through evening mist, vanes turning.

The ice underfoot changes, and this is Judecca, the fourth and final zone, named for Judas, the precinct of those who betrayed their benefactors. The souls are fully submerged, entombed in complete transparency, frozen through in whatever attitude the ice took them. Silence, total, and the wind. And then the mist thins, and Dante sees the windmill.

Lucifer stands waist-deep at the exact center of the frozen lake, at the exact center of the earth. He is enormous beyond the scale of everything we have met. The tower-sized giants would not reach his elbow. He has three faces on one head, a hideous inversion of the Trinity, and beneath each face a pair of wings, a bat’s, featherless, membranous, and they never stop beating.

Six leathery wings threshing eternally, generating the three freezing gales that lock the lake, and Lucifer himself, into the ice. The emperor of the sorrowful kingdom is his own prison’s refrigeration plant, self-frozen by his own attempt at flight. Each of the three mouths chews a sinner. In the black mouth and the yellow, feet first, hang Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Julius Caesar.

And in the center mouth, head first, so that only the legs kick, hangs Judas Iscariot, the worst human being who ever lived, and the claws of the center face flay his back as the teeth work. Betrayal of God’s church and betrayal of God’s empire, side by side by side, chewed eternally. The very bottom holds no throne, only a beautiful ruin jammed in ice of its own manufacture, gnawing. The exit is the strangest hundred lines in the poem.

Dante clamps his arms around Virgil’s neck, and Virgil, timing the wing beats, leaps onto Lucifer himself and climbs down the devil, tuft by tuft, toward the point where the thigh swells at the hip. And there, with effort and distress, he rotates, turns himself upside down, and begins climbing in what Dante senses insist is the wrong direction, back up. They squeeze through a crack in the rock, and Dante looks back and sees Lucifer’s legs sticking up out of the stone, inverted, and his mind briefly breaks. They have passed the center of the earth, the point toward which all weight everywhere falls, and down has become up.

When the rebel angel fell from heaven, Virgil explains, he struck this side of the world, and the land itself fled from the contact, recoiling under the sea to the northern hemisphere, and the earth rushed upward behind him and raised in the empty southern ocean a mountain—the mountain of Purgatory, the mountain Ulysses drowned in sight of. The entire geography of salvation in this poem is the splash. Evil having built, without intending it, the staircase out. They walk through the hidden stream running up through the dark of the earth, Virgil first, Dante second, the whole night and more, until through a round opening far above Dante sees the beautiful things the sky carries.

And from there we came out to see once more the stars. Every one of the three great books of the Comedy ends on that same word, stars. Dante finished the Inferno around 1314, finished the entire Comedy in 1321, and died that September in Ravenna of malaria caught crossing the marshes on a diplomatic errand for his host—who was, life having a taste for symmetry, Guido Novello da Polenta, nephew of Francesca da Rimini. The city that had sentenced him to the fire spent the following centuries begging for the body back, and Ravenna never gave it.

The friars of his church once hid the bones in a wall to keep a pope from shipping them to Florence, and they stayed lost in that wall until workmen broke into it by accident in 1865. He lies in Ravenna still. Florence, which burned his sentence into the record in 1302, formally revoked it in 2008, 706 years late, and maintains in its great church of Santa Croce a grand marble tomb for him with his statue seated above it, glowering. The tomb is empty.

It has always been empty. The exile kept his terms.