Inferno
(Dante)

Inferno begins with Dante in a deep and dark valley. He doesn’t really know how he came to be there, and he just wants to get back home. But, he encounters several wild animals that block his path. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil arrives to tell Dante that he can’t get passed the animals to get home the short way. In fact, the only way for Dante to get home is to tour Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In fact, the Virgin Mary herself has assigned Virgil to help Dante get through the first part of his trip: Hell.

And so, these two heroes begin a journey that lasts the entire rest of the poem. They start off by travelling through Limbo, the first circle of Hell, the dwelling place where people lived before Christ and, therefore, couldn’t be saved.

In the second circle, lustful sinners are tormented by great storms. Dante meets a woman named Francesca da Rimini there, who had an affair with her husband’s brother.

In the third circle, gluttons are made to suffer under a freezing rain. They meet Ciacco, a man from Florence, just like Dante.

In the forth circle, the greedy and the wasteful push heavy wheels around in circles, eternally insulting each other along the way.

In the fifth circle, the Wrathful fight in the muddy river Styx, while the Sullen are buried forever deep below the surface of the mud.

They next reach the gates of the city of Dis, where the sinners refuse to allow Dante and Virgil to pass. An angel must be sent to repel the sinners and let them through. Once inside the city, and also the sixth circle, Dante sees Heretics trapped in fiery tombs.

In the seventh circle, the Violent are punished. Virgil explains the Dante that all the sins he’s seen so far result from a lack of self control. But violence is a second, and worse, kind of sin. And there are different kinds of violence and different kinds of fraud.

So the eighth and ninth circles are dedicated to different kinds of fraud.

They cross into the eighth circle by riding on the back of a great beast named Geryon. This circle has ten pouches, and the travelers visit each kind of fraud separately. In each pouch, a very different kind of punishment is seen. In the fifth pouch, for example, sinners are submerged in a river of boiling pitch. If they come up for a little relief from the pitch, demons with long pitchforks run to them and stab them again and again. In the ninth pouch, those that caused scandal and division are constantly cut by a demon with a sharp sword. They then heal and are cut again, for eternity.

They finally arrive to the ninth circle of hell, which is also divided into four different areas. They pass towering giants that are buried up to the waist in the ground, Nimrod from the Tower of Babel among them. In the second zone, sinners are frozen in an icy lake, with their head only sticking up above the ice. In the third zone, sinners are lain out naked on the ice to suffer, their tear having frozen over their eyes, blinding them. In the fourth and final zone, Lucifer himself is there, a giant, three-headed beast half-buried in the ice, three great traitors in his three mouths. Other sinners are completely submerged below the icy surface.

The tour of Hell over now, Dante climbs onto Virgil’s back, and the ghost climbs Lucifer’s body, emerging on the southern hemisphere of the earth. They have come to Purgatory. Virgil must go back, and Dante must continue to the next divine realm.