Dante’s Inferno, Canto I

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy chronicles his journey through the afterlife in three cantiche—from hell (Inferno), to purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally to heaven (Paradiso)—each comprising 33 cantos. Writing in idiomatic Tuscan rather than the more common, but less widely understood, Latin, Dante is widely credited with establishing Italian as a literary language and opening up contemporary literature to a wider, less scholarly audience. He wrote his epic during his political exile from Florence, and completed it in 1320, just a year before his death. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first American to translate the Divine Comedy into English, publishing this version in 1867.