The Inferno remains literature’s most hallowed and graphic vision of Hell. Dante plunges readers into this unforgettable world with a deceptively simple—and now legendary—tercet: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark For the straightforward pathway had been lost. With these words, Dante plunges readers into the unforgettable world of the Inferno—one of the most graphic visions of Hell ever created. In this first part of the epic The Divine Comedy, Dante is led by the poet Virgil down into the nine circles of Hell, where he travels through nightmare landscapes of fetid cesspools, viper pits, frozen lakes, and boiling rivers of blood and witnesses sinners being beaten, burned, eaten, defecated upon, and torn to pieces by demons. Along the way he meets the most fascinating characters known to the classical and medieval world—the silver-tongued Ulysses, lustful Francesca da Rimini, the heretical Farinata degli Uberti, and scores of other intriguing and notorious figures. This edition of the Inferno revives the famous Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, which first introduced Dante’s literary genius to a broad American audience. “Opening the book we stand face to face with the poet,” wrote William Dean Howells of Longfellow’s Dante, “and when his voice ceases we may marvel if he has not sung to us in his own Tuscan.” Lyrically graceful and brimming with startlingly vivid images, Dante’s Inferno is a perpetually engrossing classic that ranks with the greatest works of Homer and Shakespeare. Features a map of Hell and illustrations by Gustave Doré. In many respects, Dante’s Inferno is not an unfamiliar place. Its most interesting inhabitants are not classical monsters, mythological figures, or heroes but instead are contemporary Italians, figures from all over the peninsula. It is an all too human world that we all immediately recognize as the one in which we live. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that Hell is other people. Dante would have said: “We have met the damned, and they are we.” —from the Introduction by Peter Bondanella Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University and a past President of the American Association for Italian Studies, Peter Bondanella has published a number of translations of Italian classics (Boccaccio, Cellini, Machiavelli, Vasari), books on Italian Renaissance literature (Machiavelli, Guicciardini) and Italian cinema (Fellini, Rossellini), and a dictionary of Italian literature. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. Much of what we know of Dante’s earliest years comes to us from La Vita Nuova (The New Life, completed around 1293), in which he recounts his idealized love for Beatrice Portinari. Beatrice died in 1290 but remained Dante’s idealized love and muse throughout his life. She figures largely in La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), which Dante probably began around 1308 during his extensive travels throughout Italy. Dante Alighieri is considered to be one of the world’s greatest poets. In the words of the twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot, “Dante and Shakespeare, divide the world between them. There is no third.”