The Divine Comedy

A long narrative poem in three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, recounting a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, a idealized figure drawn from a woman Dante had loved in life. Written in exile in the vernacular Tuscan dialect rather than Latin, it populates its afterlife with named contemporaries and historical figures placed according to Dante's own moral and political judgment of them, fusing personal grievance, Christian theology and classical learning into a single structure of exacting formal design, terza rima verse organized into cantos of consistent numerical pattern throughout.