[Low rumbling] ♪ [Scratching] ♪ Man: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.

♪ Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me!

how hard a thing it is to say.

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern?

The very thought of which renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more But of the good to treat, which there I found, Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

♪ Narrator: He had been on the run for nearly 4 years, moving almost constantly from place to place across the rough mountain high country above the Tuscan plains... finding refuge when he could with powerful families sympathetic to his plight, then moving on, when sometime in the spring of 1306, he came to a remote castle high in the mountains of the Lunigiana, a wild region far north and west of his native city of Florence, neutral territory that for years had hosted refugees from both sides of the savagely warring factions of his fiercely divided city.

How long he remained there is unclear-- a year perhaps, maybe more-- but it was almost certainly there sometime in the winter of 1306 that the beleaguered, 41-year-old exiled poet set to work on an epic poem that he had been revolving in his mind for some time, a monumental work that he would wrench from himself under the worst possible circumstances, that would take him the rest of his life to complete, that would in the end make his name one of the most famous and universally recognized in the history of world culture and itself be acclaimed as arguably the greatest single work of literature ever created in the Western world... [Thunder] the "Divine Comedy."

Man: The "Divine Comedy" begins with a mid-life crisis.

A man of 35 years old in the fiction of the work-- Dante, himself-- who at a certain point wakes up, looks around, doesn't recognize the landscape-- the physical landscape and the moral landscape around him-- and this is a moment of fracture in his existence, and it is a moment of fracture which implies naturally not only his private life but the life around him, which makes no sense anymore.

Woman: Dante knows he's writing something very different and very special, and the "Divine Comedy" is one of these books that are made every once in a while, in human history.

Narrator: Nothing quite like it had ever been written before.

Narrated in the first person by Dante himself, no poem of its kind had ever started out with such startling and personal intensity or brought individual human experience into such vivid and immediate relationship with forces far larger or sought to encompass in its vast embrace the entire range of human experience.

Chronicling an extraordinary pilgrimage through the 3 realms of the afterlife-- Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso-- it will tell of a harrowing journey, of a descent into the depths of Hell, of a subsequent ascent up through Purgatory, and thence on to the farthest and most sublime regions of Paradise itself... a heart-rending, intimate, and transcendent journey at once fantastic and real, epic and personal, soaringly allegorical and inexpressibly vivid.

Man: This is a story that begins badly in Hell, then ends happily in Heaven.

Different man: This is the journey from exile to homeland.

This is the condition of humankind exiled from God.

The experience of a medieval reader reading the poem would have been shocking.

Man: We'll remember most, stranger.

Gragnolati: People would have not been expecting to find that strong individuality... [Man shouts] in a poem that is also meant to be a journey towards salvation and towards transcendence.

Dante was certainly aware of doing something new.

Dante has made himself the subject of his literature, and so I think it's inevitable that one would ask "Who really was Dante?

What's really driving him?"

Narrator: The poem comes to us across an immense gulf of time.

Written more than 700 years ago by a proud, acutely sensitive, and fiercely ambitious self-taught poet and sometimes politician born in 1265, begun by its beleaguered author at his own moment of harrowing loss and dislocation.

Far from home, on his own with no way back-- "a wanderer, almost a beggar," he wrote at the time.

Framed for a crime he didn't commit in 1302 and exiled on pain of death from the striving, fiercely divided city of his birth never to return.

Cachey: The whole project of the poem emerges from the wound of the exile and his reputation that has been ruined by this unjust banishment from his city.

He's alone.

He's in danger.

He can be killed by anybody out of Florence.

He's supposed to be hanged or burned if he goes back to Florence.

Narrator: Dante wrenched his inimitable masterpiece into existence at a moment of supreme crisis and change, not only for himself but for the wider world generally as the feudal structures of the Middle Ages began to give way and a new modern world loomed into view, a world in which every aspect of the moral, political, social, religious, and economic order seemed to be changing and breaking apart and nowhere more so than in Florence itself, a city long possessed, as Dante well knew, by at once the loftiest and the basest, the most creative and destructive human instincts and impulses.

Woman: The poem emerges from this moment of profound crisis.

There's a political crisis at hand, intense never-ending conflict and fragmentation, and Dante really believes that we're close to end times.

There's the real urgency of now, this moment, in which we have to act now.

Man: Dante is faced with corruption, he's faced with sinning, he's faced with violence on the part of human beings against other human beings, and his reaction is not to accept that, but it's actually to portray, to depict it, and to show there is another way.

Man: The idea that one would write a hundred cantos essentially about one's own spiritual journey, turning one's personal life into the model for all humanity, it's an act of huge arrogance and of huge ambition, and at the same time, Dante is trying to say that this is possible for everyone.

Pertile: After all, the purpose of Dante's major work, the "Comedy," is to change the world... and the purpose of showing the conditions of the damned in "Inferno" or the conditions of the purging souls in "Purgatory" or even the conditions of the blessed in "Paradise" is for us, for human beings, to reform ourselves and our lives.

Dante means it.

Dante means what he writes.

It is not a game.

♪ Narrator: For Dante himself, the experience of exile and of crafting the monumental poem would transform him utterly, exerting a powerfully centrifugal, ever-widening impact on his life, on his work, and on the vast posterity of readers he was determined the great poem would speak to.

Lombardi: You think about the exile, and you think about all the hardships of what happened to him, the people that he was exposed to and the languages and the stories.

All he has, his very life, is consigned to this work, and he's putting it, in a way, on the line of writing and reading, and it's extraordinary.

Woman: He might have died along the way.

As he says at the beginning of "Paradiso" XXV, "this poem that made me macro," that wore me out, that consumed me, and there is a way in which you feel that that work-- he took it to the end of his life, and it was consuming.

Narrator: At the very heart of Dante's extraordinary poem, propelling it onward from beginning to end would be two powerful forces: the violently bitter hatred, factionalism, corruption, and greed of his native city, which he longed to heal; and his love for an ineffably beautiful woman named Beatrice, a Florentine girl he had met in childhood, who had died when she was 24, whom he would write passionately about all his life and to whom he longed somehow to find a way to return.

♪ Pertile: One of the reasons why Dante writes this magnificent poem is to provide himself with a passport back to his home, to his beloved home, Florence, but the more he writes, the bigger the separation becomes, the bigger the difference becomes between him and Florence.

Man: I don't think that the poem would have had its kind of power had he managed to stay in Florence.

He also might not have written it or not written it in the same way if he were not in exile from Florence.

In some ways, the poem becomes the homeland for him that the city is not.

He actually creates in the poem his own home.

♪ [Bells tolling] ♪ Bruscagli: This is Florence.

This is the famous view of Florence, but Dante never saw the city that we see today.

In order to imagine what Dante would have seen, you have to mentally erase the dome and the cathedral and then the Palazzo Vecchio and the Church of Santa Croce.

The Florence of Dante would have had the emerging white octagon of the baptistry and a lot of towers, a lot of, let's say, medieval skyscrapers, all together in a small space around the baptistry.

♪ Ric Burns: Antonio, when was the first time you became conscious of Dante?

Oh, I'm from Florence, and I was conscious of Dante maybe at, uh, elementary school.

Right.

Since I was born basically.

Yeah.

♪ Bruscagli: Dante in a way invented Florence... because he gave Florence such a distinctive and powerful identity in good ways and also in bad ways.

Still, long after he was exiled, he said he hoped that he'll be able to go back to Florence and to be crowned poet in his baptistry with the city admitting the injustice that was done to him.

Narrator: Dante's wish was never to be fulfilled, but Florence remains as haunted by Dante as Dante was by Florence during his 56 years.

Bruscagli: Florence is for Dante la città partita, the city divided, the city divided between parties, between factions, a restless city without peace, where everybody seems to hate each other.

According to Dante in the "Divine Comedy," there are 3 sparks--superbia, invidia, e avarizia, pride, envy, and greed.

These are the 3 sparks that have inflamed the hearts of the Florentines and are tormenting the city, which is destroying, devouring itself in a way.

♪ Narrator: He was born in the spring of 1265 sometime in the last 3 weeks of May while the sun was in Gemini, if hints in the "Divine Comedy" are to be believed, into a modestly venerable family in a neighborhood called Porta San Piero, one of the most ancient districts in the very heart of the proudly independent city on the banks of the Arno.

He was christened later that year beneath the vaulting mosaics of the great Baptistry of St. John.

Bruscagli: For Dante, the city that he knew and loved rotated around the baptistry.

The life of every single citizen of Florence started in the baptistry, which was supposed to be the old Temple of Mars, a physical link to the Roman ancestry of the city.

Narrator: His father Alighiero was a businessman, the son and grandson of money lenders and traders.

His mother Bella died when he was 10, leaving Dante and his sister with their father, who soon remarried.

♪ Little is known of his early education.

It is presumed he was fundamentally self-taught, making all the more astonishing the formidable erudition he acquired across a broad range of subjects: astronomy; geography; Tuscan art and literature; Provencal love poetry; Latin writers like Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil; the philosophy of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.

A precocity that was recognized and warmly encouraged by the leading public intellectual of the day, the much older Brunetto Latini.

Cachey: Dante was an autodidact, a self-taught intellectual.

He didn't have a university degree, and I think that it's something that suggests a vulnerable person, a person who was awkward, was not authorized by education or by social class to assume the kind of authoritative position that he later presumes to through his literary works.

Narrator: From an early age, he was prone to fits of fainting and to episodes of fever and delirium that would leave him lifeless for a spell.

Profoundly sensitive to the world around him, he often had visions and may have suffered from a kind of epilepsy... and he himself later took these vulnerabilities as a sign that he had been endowed with special powers.

Webb: Dante had a tremendous capacity for allowing space for visions.

From early on, he felt himself to be somebody who was capable of accessing other realities, of a kind of openness and indeed a vulnerability.

Was he suffering from fainting or dizzy spells?

Was he an epileptic?

Nonetheless, he embraced this as a kind of openness to vision, to truth.

Narrator: Sometime before he was 18, his father died, leaving him a small inheritance and with it the freedom to pursue his nascent literary ambitions.

Around the same time, he was married to a young woman named Gemma Donati to whom he had been betrothed at a young age, who would bring social distinction but little dowry to the marriage and who in the years to come would give birth to 3 sons and a daughter.

6 years later in June 1289, Dante himself now 24, was one of the elite Florentine cavalry who, with 12,000 Guelph soldiers, overwhelmed a Ghibelline army at the savagely bloody Battle of Campaldino outside Arezzo.

♪ Looking back, the year 1289 would prove to be a watershed in Dante's life.

Events would soon begin to unfold that in the years to come would propel him outward into the volatile, dangerous political world of Florence and beyond and also inward down into the depths of his own memory and imagination.

[Thunder, rain falling] As that journey began, almost everyone he had ever known and everything he had ever learned and experienced would come to find a place in the pages of his writing and none more so than the figure of a radiant Florentine girl, whose image would haunt and illuminate his imagination and inner life until the day he died.

♪ He was only 9 when he first saw her at a party in the house of a neighboring nobleman Folco Portinari on the first of May in the spring of 1274, if Giovanni Boccaccio's account is to be believed.

[Birds chirping] Many years later in an extraordinary autobiographical work, he returned to the life-changing moment of their first encounter.

Fazzini as Dante: 9 times the heaven of the light had returned to where it was at my birth when she first appeared before my eyes-- she whom many called Beatrice.

Narrator: She appeared at this feast to the eyes of our Dante, and although a mere boy, he received her sweet image to his heart with such affection that from that day forward it never departed.

♪ Ben son--ben son Beatrice.

Woman: That initial meeting was transformative.

He describes it as if it were some kind of revelation.

He's not yet aware of what it's a revelation of, but he knows that it's unlike anything else he's ever experienced.

♪ Narrator: All through his childhood and on into adolescence, he searched for her often in the streets of Florence, yearning for another glimpse.

In 1283 when they were both 18, he saw her again dressed not in crimson this time but in white, walking "between two gracious women, older than she."

Nothing prepared him for what happened when she turned and acknowledged him with a smile.

Salute a voi.

♪ Fazzini as Dante: That was the first time her words had reached my ears, and I felt such bliss that I withdrew, as if drunk, to the solitude of my room.

Whereupon a sweet sleep came over me, bringing with it an astonishing vision.

I seemed to see a fiery cloud, and in it a lordly figure, frightening to behold-- but filled it seemed with wondrous joy.

And of the words he spoke, I understood but a few, among them this: "Ego dominus tuus"-- "I am your Lord."

In his arms, I thought I saw a sleeping person.

Naked, but for a crimson silken veil.

Whom, gazing upon, intently, I saw was she who earlier had deigned to greet me.

In one hand, he seemed to be holding something that was burning-- and I thought I heard him say these words: "Vide cor tuum"-- "Behold your heart."

After a while, he awakened the sleeping woman-- and strove to make her eat the burning object in his hands-- which she ate, with doubt and fear.

Then his happiness turned to bitter tears, and weeping, he cradled the woman in his arms, and ascended into the sky.

At which point, the anguish I felt was more than my fragile sleep could sustain, and I woke.

♪ Narrator: The haunting vision marked the beginning of his career as a poet.

"Thinking over what had happened to me," he wrote, "I decided to compose a sonnet and share it "with several well-known poets of my acquaintance, "asking them to interpret the vision I had had in my sleep."

Bruscagli: And many poets answered with other sonnets and other poetic interpretations of his vision... and then he became truly a great friend of one of those poets, his own primo amico Guido Cavalcanti.

Narrator: Guido Cavalcanti, an aristocratic, supremely gifted lyricist 10 years Dante's senior, would become not only his closest friend and mentor in the group, but a proponent, as Dante himself would soon become, of the dolce stil novo, the "sweet new style"... a rhapsodic new form written not in Latin but in the Florentine vernacular, the language of everyday life with which they would revolutionize the tradition of love poetry in Florence.

Bruscagli: There is a profound democratic issue here at work.

Dante uses the vernacular because this is the language that everybody knows and that everybody can understand and in particular opens access to culture and poetry and knowledge to women.

Barolini: When Dante started as a courtly love poet, he wrote exquisite lyrics in the vernacular but lyrics in which women have no agency and no voice.

In the way the courtly lyric is set up, it's a completely narcissistic edifice in which the male poet-lover explores his own feelings.

The lady is entirely there as a projection of the male desire and fears and concerns.

♪ Narrator: As his engagement with the circle of Florentine writers deepened, Dante continued to seek out the woman of his dreams in the streets of Florence.

One day in church when acquaintances, following the line of his rapt gaze, mistook the object of his infatuation for another woman, Dante indulged their error to conceal the true identity of his great passion, but when rumors about his supposedly unseemly bearing towards the other woman reached Beatrice herself, the next time they chanced to meet she coolly turned away and refused to greet him ever again.

♪ The stinging rejection rocked him to the core, then propelled a profound shift both in his understanding of love and in his poetry.

Fazzini as Dante: So that... Bruscagli: The mission will be to celebrate her immense value anyway.

"I will praise her in my poetry even if she does not recognize my own existence."

Narrator: If this new sense of love now struck him with the force of revelation, it was one that would soon be confronted with an even more devastating challenge.

♪ In June 1290 at the age of 24, Beatrice Portinari died most likely in a difficult childbirth.

Dante himself had just turned 25.

♪ By then, he had spent 7 years composing sonnets and canzone in her honor.

Except for a few formal greetings in the street, they had never even spoken to each other.

Webb: For Dante, the loss of Beatrice creates this horrific crisis in many different ways.

If poetry emerges because of the encounter with Beatrice, because of her presence, what then do we do when she is lost?

Narrator: Her death hurled him into an abyss of darkness and despair, propelled him to spend nearly 2 1/2 years of intense spiritual and philosophical introspection and study at the end of which he set to work on an astonishingly original literary composition.

Pulling his poems to her out of his desk, he carefully selected and ordered them, then linked them together with passages of prose narration, transforming what had been isolated, self-contained lyric poems into a unique autobiographical narrative.

He called the new work "La Vita Nuova," "The New Life."

In it, he told the story of his love for her, how he had longed for her and looked for her and written poems and songs to her and how in doing so he had been transformed.

Giunta: "La Vita Nuova" is a very new way to talk about love.

Many poets in the 13th century and before talk about the lady they love as an angel that came from heaven to give pleasure to the lover.

The poets used this image just as a device, but Dante really believes in this comparison.

Webb: At the end of the "Vita Nuova," he's beginning to think of how to capture in poetry the presence of Beatrice.

How can poetry produce the presence of those who have been lost?

Narrator: Dante completed the unusual new work sometime around 1294, 4 years after Beatrice had died.

He ended the work with an astonishingly prophetic statement of purpose and commitment.

If it be pleasing to Him who is that for which all things live, and if my life is long enough, I hope to say things about her that have never been said about any woman.

[Wind blowing] ♪ Bruscagli: For Dante, death is not the end of everything.

Death is a passage to another life, to a superior form of existing, where your identity is clarified forever for better or worse.

Dante sees our mortal life within the perspective of a passage which will reveal the essence of what you have been.

This is what it means for Dante to go through this terrible passage of death, which is also a passage of revelation and illumination of your final identity.

♪ [Wind blowing] Pertile: In 1295, Dante was 30.

He wasn't a kid anymore.

He wasn't--because he was a man, and that is when he became involved in Florentine politics.

The way in which people relate themselves in a civic community became absolutely important to him in the second half of his life, but if politics becomes central to Dante, Beatrice is still central, as well.

These are the two components that Dante manages to bring together in the poem because on the one hand it is the story of Dante's return to Beatrice.

On the other hand, it is the story of Dante's discovery of the way in which people of this world live as opposed to the way in which they ought to live.

[People shouting] Narrator: For years, just beneath the surface of the staunchly Guelph city, tensions had been on the rise along many of the old fault lines of clan, class, and power that had troubled the city for generations.

By 1295, a coalition of merchants, artisans, and guild members determined to limit the infighting among the city's aristocratic factions had succeeded in establishing a new kind of democratic government in Florence, vesting power in a rotating group of 6 elected officials, called priors, requiring all to be active members of one of the city's main guilds and barring members of the nobility from holding public office at all.

That same year, Dante enrolled in the Guild of the Apothecaries and Physicians explicitly to qualify for political office.

Bruscagli: The dynamism of the city of Florence, which gives space and power to classes which were not powerful until that point, can be seen as a first seed of some sort of a democracy in Italy.

This is something that appealed so much to many Florentines of the time, including Dante, the idea that the power was in the hands of the people and not of the local aristocrats.

Narrator: But over the next 5 years, the city would sink further and further into an morass of factionalism and infighting accelerated by the predatory ambitions of the new pope in Rome, who was determined to bring Florence under his control.

Bruscagli: The pope was Boniface--Boniface Ottavo-- and he had his own agenda, a very strong theocratic agenda of the papacy being all powerful, and this is this frame of mind which Dante hated more and more.

Narrator: And now the Guelph party itself began to split into two bitterly opposed factions, the White Guelphs and the Black.

Bruscagli: The Blacks were in favor of a very close alliance with the pope, and the Whites were more cautious in letting the pope be involved with the local politics of the city.

[Swords clattering, men shouting] Narrator: Year after year, the struggle between the Black and White Guelphs intensified.

[Horses neighing] Bruscagli: Political life was truly very violent.

So violent was the opposition between the Whites and the Blacks that people were trying to assassinate each other in the streets of Florence.

♪ Webb: Dante sees himself being increasingly swept up in this absurd conflict that is tearing his city apart, that he describes as always deadly, certainly cannibalistic, this battle between the White and the Black Guelphs and the struggles for power that swirl in powers from outside and powers from inside, and these tiny clan quarrels become exploded outwards when other powers interfere from beyond.

Narrator: In 1299, the White Guelphs had regained power, and Dante's role in city affairs rose higher, culminating on June 13, 1300, not long after his 35th birthday, when he was elected to a two-month term as one the city's 6 ruling priors and two days later entered office.

"All my woes and misfortunes," he later said, "had their origin and commencement in my unlucky election to the priorate."

The trouble began almost immediately.

On June 23, a gang of angry Black Guelph insurgents assaulted a group of civic leaders on their way to mass outside the baptistry in a violent protest that rapidly spun out of control.

When Dante and the other city leaders met the next day to try to restore calm, their solution would prove for Dante personally devastating.

To quell the chaos, an equal number of Black and White ringleaders were banished from the city, including, among the exiled Whites, Dante's great former friend Guido Cavalcanti, who in the wetlands surrounding Sarzana contracted malaria and was dead by August.

By then, the pope had become so enraged with the White faction in Florence for thwarting his ambitions that as summer turned to fall he reached a secret agreement with the king of France to send an army, led by the king's own brother, south to bring the unruly Florentines to heel.

By the fall of 1301 with French forces advancing on Tuscany, an embassy of Florentine political leaders, Dante among them, hastened south for Rome, hoping to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis... but the time for diplomatic solutions had passed.

[Horse neighs] On All Soul's Eve with 1,200 French horsemen and a contingent of armed Black Guelph exiles close behind, Charles of Valois arrived outside the city gates of Florence and asked to be admitted under the pretense of serving as peacemaker, a tense charade that went on for 3 days... ♪ [Owl hooting] And then on the night November 4, 1301, the Black coup started.

[Clattering] [Explosion] For 6 days, chaos and destruction raged through the helpless city on a scale unimaginable even by the standards Florence itself had set.

[Horse neighing] "Every friend became a foe," a horrified eyewitness reported.

"Brother forsook brother, son forsook father."

"All love, all humanity was extinguished."

[People screaming] ♪ Before it was over, more than 1,000 houses had been burned or destroyed.

Bruscagli: Dante was not in Florence.

He had been sent to Rome as an ambassador, and on his way back, he learned about the violence in Florence.

His family survived, but there is evidence that his houses were sacked and partially destroyed.

Narrator: When the violence finally subsided, the victorious Black Guelphs unleashed a savage legal vendetta against the vanquished White faction.

In the end, 559 death sentences had been meted out and more than 600 people exiled.

Bruscagli: He was probably in Siena when he learned that he had been accused of being a corrupt politician.

It was a farce of a trial, and everybody knew it, so he never showed up in Florence for the trial because he knew--he knew exactly what would happen.

Narrator: In the spring of 1302, Dante himself was condemned to death and sentenced to be burned at the stake if he ever again returned to the city.

♪ Bruscagli: When Cacciaguida, Dante's ancestor, tells him in the 17th canto of "Paradise," "You'll leave behind you everything that you most tenderly loved," that means it's a rupture.

It's a trauma so deep that the Dante of the exile is a different person than the Dante who lived in Florence.

♪ Narrator: Exile came as a staggering blow, and if the first impact was immediate and life-changing, it would take time for the grim reality of his situation to fully sink in.

Webb: Being exiled in Dante's time is something we really can't comprehend fully now.

People and their families were incredibly rooted into the fabric of the city.

You know, Knowing where you were born, you would know where you would be married, and you knew where you would be buried, as well.

Bruscagli: The exile for Dante meant humiliation and poverty.

Dante is very frank, very explicit about that in many writings during his exile.

Fazzini as Dante: I have wandered much like a beggar through just about every place our language is spoken.

A ship without sail or rudder, borne to various harbors, havens, and shores by the dry wind of grievous poverty.

[Thunder] ♪ Bruscagli: So he had to reinvent himself and to become more and more accustomed to a totally different political and social landscape compared to Florence, the courts and castles of center north Italy in an aristocratic atmosphere where he was a uomo di corte-- could be a diplomat, could be a companion of the lord-- and offering in exchange what?

His intellectual brilliance.

Giunta: And it's like this new situation makes him understand that the world is bigger than he thought, and he has to deal with different problems and ideas.

Narrator: What two years of wandering revealed to him was a wider world riddled with conflict and division, lacking a common culture of nobility and public virtue, lacking even a common language that might hold its disparate peoples together.

Something in him was stirring.

Giunta: Before the exile, before 1301, Dante was--I wouldn't say a footnote in the history of literature, but he was not the author of a great work.

He was 35, and he had written only the "Vita Nuova" and some poems.

He goes into exile, kicked out of Florence, and in 15 or 20 years, he writes all his stuff basically.

It's like the exile was the spring that created all this powerful creation.

♪ Narrator: Sometime in 1306 as his fugitive existence continued, he came to a remote mountain citadel, the Castello di Malaspina in the Lunigiana, where he came under the protection of a branch of the powerful Malaspina family.

It was there, in the winter of 1306, that something that had been incubating deep within him for a long time now began to rise up and take shape in his imagination.

♪ It was the vision of a poem, an epic poem, a poem on a scale and with an ambition unlike anything he had ever written before, a poem that would reach back to the greatest works of literature ever created but one that would of necessity inaugurate an entirely new chapter in the history of the poetic literature and imagination of the West.

Bruscagli: Those months at the Malaspina Castle, this is the time when Dante started the "Divine Comedy," where the urgency of this new invention, of this new poem took over his life and eclipsed and marginalized all the other works that he had imagined.

♪ Pertile: The poem is the result of at least 15 years of writing, and in those 15 years, the poem grows.

The poem probably was born as an apotheosis or a homage to Beatrice, but it developed into something different, into something new, something that was much more politically engaged, much more engaged with the history of Dante's time, and I wonder whether Dante himself knew that he had this in him.

Narrator: The intensity of Dante's vision was almost overwhelming, and as he wrote, the power of his imaginings often came to him with such force, it was as if they were happening in the very room he was writing in.

It was as if a door in space and time were opening before him and the poem itself were the door, one that would not only recount but itself be a journey into the underworld and afterlife... and from the very start, the intimacy and immediacy with which Dante drew his invisible cohort of readers into the strange and mesmerizing dreamworld of the poem would make those readers secret sharers in the life-altering experience recounted... [Whoosh] as if we, too, had just passed through an invisible doorway into another realm and also found ourselves lost in a dark and inscrutable landscape with no sense of where we were or how we had gotten there and no way to get out.

[Booming] [Crickets chirping] ♪ Fazzini as Dante: Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

♪ Ah me!

how hard a thing it is to say.

Adoyo: "The Commedia: begins with Dante coming to in the dark forest... Fazzini as Dante: savage, rough.

and he doesn't know how he ended up there.

He's lost, completely disoriented, he can't find his way.

♪ Narrator as Dante: I cannot well repeat how there I entered, So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way-- But when I finally reached the mountain's foot there, at the termination of that vale which had with so much fear undone my heart, I lifted up my gaze, and saw its back Already dressed with rays from that great sphere Which guideth others straight on every road.

Then was my fear a little quieted.

Adoyo: There's a direction he could follow when he notices the sun rising on the shoulders of that hill in front of him, that mountain which Dante describes as the source of every joy.

Narrator as Dante: And, resting for a moment my tired limbs, I once more started up the forlorn slope, My weight borne always on the lower foot.

And here--almost at the start of the ascent-- Appeared a panther-- light and very fast, entirely covered with a spotted pelt.

And never straying from my line of sight, He moved so to impede my way, That I was several times turned back again.

But hope was hardly able to prevent the fear I felt when I beheld a lion.

He seemed as if against me he was coming With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger, So that it seemed the air was afraid of him; And then a she-wolf showed herself; she seemed to carry every craving in her leanness; she had already brought despair to many.

The very sight of her so weighted me with fearfulness that I abandoned hope of ever climbing up that mountain slope.

♪ Bruscagli: The panther is lust, the lion pride, and the she-wolf greed, and lust and pride in a way are individual, private sins, but the third one is the real problem because the third one, the greed, is the beast that mates with all other animals, that corrupts the world so profoundly that St. Paul himself had said that cupiditas, greed, was the root of all evil.

♪ Out of that sense of despair that follows, that despair that is dragging him back to the dark forest where "the sun is mute," suddenly out of that comes this nondescript shade.

He's not quite sure who that is.

♪ Narrator as Dante: While I retreated down to lower ground, before my eyes there suddenly appeared one who seemed faint because of the long silence.

♪ When I saw him in that vast wilderness, "Have pity on me," were the words I cried.

"Whatever you may be-- a shade, a man."

Misere de mei, qualque tu sei-- Ombra, or omo certo.

Not man; ♪ I was once man...

I was born though late sub-Julio and lived in Rome under the good Augustus in the season of the false and lying gods.

I was a poet... and sang the righteous son of Anchises, who had come from Troy when flames destroyed the pride of Ilium.

♪ But why do you return to wretchedness?

Why not climb up the mountain of delight, the origin and cause of every joy?

[Crickets chirping] Narrator: The figure standing before him, Dante realized with a shock, was the long-dead spirit of one of the greatest poets who had ever lived-- the towering Roman poet, Virgil.

The literary forebear Dante revered most.

The poet who, long before, in the last decades before the birth of Christ, had sung--as Homer himself had sung-- of the fall of Troy.

Of the desperate flight west of the Trojan prince, Aeneas.

Of the remaking of a new world from the broken pieces of the old.

And of the founding of Rome.

Stunned, Dante now implored the great poet to help him find his way.

♪ You see the beast that made me turn aside; help me, O famous sage, to stand against her, for she has made my blood and pulses shudder.

♪ It is another path that you must take if you would leave this savage wilderness; the beast that is the cause of your outcry allows no man to pass along her track... but blocks him even to the point of death; her nature is so squalid, so malicious that she can never sate her greedy will.

When she has fed, she's hungrier than ever.

Therefore, I think and judge it best for you to follow me, and I will guide you from this place-- [Distant wolf howling] through an eternal place, where you will hear the howls of desperation-- and see the ancient spirits in their pain... [Wolves growling] as each of them laments his second death; [Distant howling continues] and you will see the souls of those who are content within the flame, [Wolves growling] for they hope to reach-- whenever that may be-- the blessed people.

♪ If you would then ascend as high as these, another soul more worthy than I am will guide you; I'll leave you in her care when I depart.

♪ Bruscagli: Virgil doesn't come as a help for Dante in order to defeat the lupa-- in order to defeat the beast.

Virgil says, "This is not the way.

"You have to go another way.

"Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.

"You have to go through all the sins "and failures and triumphs of humanity "in order to, at the end of the journey, "to find yourself again and to reconstruct "the integrity of your personality, "and to, in the end, to find God."

[Crickets chirping] Webb: Now, Virgil's got to get Dante moving, right?

The problem is that Dante's terrified.

Mm-hmm.

And this is the moment when he starts saying, "Maybe I can't do this, I'm not worthy, "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul.

What right do I have to do this?"

Bruscagli: And Virgil says, "Somebody called me to come here and help you," and that somebody is Beatrice.

Webb: And so Virgil tells the story of what Beatrice said to get Dante going.

♪ Fraser as Beatrice: O anima cortese mantoana, di cui la fama ancor nel mondo dura, e durerà quanto 'l mondo lontana.

♪ Oh, spirit of the courteous Mantuan, whose fame is still a presence in the world and shall endure as long as the world lasts, my friend who has not been a friend of fortune, is hindered in his path along that lonely hillside.

He has been turned aside by terror.

From all that I have heard from him in Heaven, he is I fear already so astray, that I have come to help him much too late.

Go now, with all your persuasive word, with all that is required to see that he escapes.

Bring help to him that I may be consoled.

For I am Beatrice, who send you on.

I come from where I most long to return.

Love prompted me-- that love which makes me speak.

♪ Webb: "Love prompted me" in the Italian is "amor me mosse."

It's literally "love moved me," so "Love moved me and love makes me speak."

So, the implication for Dante is, "Look, Beatrice was moved by love.

You, too, have to get over your state of being stuck."

And so, this whole discourse here-- Beatrice's via Virgil-- is about how love prompts us to move and how Dante should take this as a kind of a modeling of how to do the same.

And then it's at this point, it turns to Dante and it's his turn to take that first step towards the thing he fears the most.

♪ Bruscagli: You don't go into a retreat.

You forget about yourself.

You accept the challenge of the world.

You relate it to any sort of human experience, and that friction will save you.

That confrontation will reveal what you are and what you should be.

It's actually opening up to the world that you save yourself, and you find a path of salvation.

[Distant crows cawing] Narrator: Emboldened by Virgil's account of Beatrice's love and concern for his well-being, Dante and his phantom guide now entered a steep and savage path that led downwards towards a hidden opening in the dark ravine.

[Thunder] They had arrived at the Gates of Hell.

Carved into the rock above the menacing entrance, barely legible in the gloom, was a fearsome inscription.

[Thunder] Narrator as Dante: Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way to the eternal pain, through me the way that runs among the lost.

Abandon all hope-- you who enter here.

♪ [Distant people screaming] ♪ Bruscagli: Inferno is a timeless place.

Nothing changes.

People don't move around.

There is not even the physical possibility of realizing the passing of time because it's a place of absolute darkness and absolute, total desperation.

[Distant screaming continues] Narrator: In the dark and turbid air, they could just make out the dismal forms of a vast multitude of anguished souls circling endlessly.

They were the defeated shades of the uncommitted, Virgil explained to his terrified companion, those who had lived without praise or disgrace or conviction of any kind, and who were now barred alike from Heaven and the depths of Hell.

Beyond these miserable shades, an even larger horde of souls pressed against the bank of a great river-- the river Acheron.

[Boat creaking] Narrator as Dante: And here, advancing toward us in a boat, an aged man--his hair was white with years-- was shouting: "Woe to you, "corrupted souls!

"Forget your hope "of ever seeing Heaven: "I come to lead you "to the other shore, "to the eternal dark, "to fire and frost.

"And you "approaching there, "you living soul, "keep well away from these-- they are the dead."

♪ Narrator: As the boat approached the far shore, the wind began to howl, the sky turned blood red... [Thunder] and Dante fell into a stupor.

♪ [Thunder continues] ♪ The heavy sleep into which Dante had fallen was broken by an immense peal of thunder.

[Thunder] Dante and Virgil were standing on the brink of an enormous abyss-- and from the dark, mist-filled valley below rose a great, sighing lament.

♪ They had come to the first Circle of Hell-- a melancholy place called Limbo-- whose occupants, Virgil explained, were guilty of no sin of their own.

♪ The sad cohort languishing there included not only unbaptized infants, but many non-Christian and classical figures of great distinction: poets, philosophers, soldiers, and kings; men and women, like Virgil himself, whose only misfortune, Virgil explained, was to have lived outside the kingdom of God-- either before the coming of Christ or beyond the reach of his teachings.

"From no other evil we now are lost," Virgil said, "and punished just with this; we have no hope, and yet we live in longing."

Bruscagli: This is the place, after all, to which Virgil himself belongs.

Virgil is a pagan, a poet, somebody who belongs to Hell--to Limbo, a place not of actual suffering, but of sighs-- a melancholic place.

Virgil is cut off from Paradise, he will never go to Paradise.

Limbo is so remarkable because, in the history of the Catholic idea of Limbo, no one ever did what Dante did.

What he does in Limbo is he takes a place that in the Catholic imaginary should be, at this point, only for unbaptized infants, and he puts in it adult Greek and Latin pagans-- Aristotle, for instance-- because he just loves classical culture.

♪ One of the major drives of the "Commedia" itself is this urge to make people present to us who are gone.

And I think, in this way, what Dante is seeking to do is to make those who have passed on, to make those who have died, present to us and to think about understanding them as present.

In some ways, we might think about it as the creation of a transmortal community, and the "Commedia" as a whole can similarly be seen as a way of imagining how to capture in poetry the presence of all of those who have died and yet remain part of our community.

♪ Narrator: Descending to the second Circle of Hell, they encountered the monstrous creature, Minos-- the fearful judge of the dead-- who examined each new soul as it arrived and assigned it with his serpentine tail to its eternal Circle in Hell.

[Minos grunting] Cachey: The tail of Minos wraps around itself to indicate where the sinners will be condemned in Hell.

Minos' tail has the same kind of spiral shape of Dante's invented space of Hell.

Kind of a parody of the confessor, right?

The sinners come before him, they confess their sins.

Of course, there's no way to get out, no ticket out.

There's no penance you can take, no 3 "Hail Marys" and 4 "Our Fathers" you can say at that point.

[Thunder] Bruscagli: As Dante and Virgil enter the second Circle of Hell, the Circle of the Lustful... [Thunderclap] looking up, Dante sees damned souls being submitted to a physical torture.

They are being punished according to a general rule of Hell Dante calls contrapasso.

Contrapasso is a sort of ironic symmetry between the sin and the punishment.

In this case, the lustful are really battered around, tortured by this eternal hurricane and which smashes them against the wall of the abyss.

And so, the tempest of love now is materialized in the actual punishment of those lustful souls.

[Thunder] Looking up, Dante notices a particular, separate group of people flying high in the middle of this hurricane and asks, "Virgilio, who are those people?"

Virgil explains these are people who were actually killed because of their sexual transgression.

[Distant, sinister laughter] Narrator: Among these slaughtered souls, Dante's gaze is drawn to two in particular: the only spirits in the maelstrom still locked in a passionate embrace.

It was the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca.

Lombardi: An Italian critic once said, and I entirely agree with him, that Francesca is the first woman to appear real and alive on the stage of literature.

[Thunder] She's an extraordinary figure.

She's--she's so full, and she has elicited so many different judgments on herself.

Barolini: If you look at Dante's trajectory as a poet, he really changes in a profound way.

By the time he reaches the "Commedia," women are moral agents-- humans having a moral self, having a moral trajectory, capable of erring, capable of not erring, full--and Francesca is an extraordinary example.

♪ Narrator: A contemporary of Dante's from Ravenna, Francesca da Rimini was a beautiful young noblewoman, who, trapped in an arranged marriage, had fallen passionately in love with her husband's younger brother Paolo, whom Dante himself may have met.

The adulterous lovers were eventually discovered by Francesca's husband Gianciotto, Paolo's older brother, who brutally murdered them both sometime around 1285.

♪ Fazzini as Dante: O battered souls, if One does not forbid it, speak with us.

[Thunder] ♪ Bruscagli: As Paolo and Francesca approach, by divine grace, the hurricane calms down.

♪ And in that moment of calm, Francesca can start her account.

♪ Francesca: O living being, gracious and benign, who through the darkened air have come to visit our souls that stained the world with blood... you have pitied our atrocious state.

♪ Whatever pleases you to hear and speak will please us, too, to hear and speak with you, now, while the wind is silent, in this place.

♪ Lombardi: And then Francesca starts telling the tale of how she fell in love and she says, "Although it pains me greatly, I will tell you."

♪ Love that can quickly seize the gentle heart, took hold of him because of my fair body.

How that was done still wounds me.

Love that releases no beloved from loving, took hold of me so strongly through his beauty that, as you see... it has not left me yet.

♪ Love led the two of us unto one death.

♪ Narrator: When Dante asks how they had come to recognize their passion for each other, she explains that it had been while reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, a courtly love poem of the kind Dante himself had once written.

[Birds chirping] Francesca: One day, to pass the time away, we read of Lancelot, how love had overcome him.

[Sniffles] We were alone, and we suspected nothing.

And time and time again, that reading led our eyes to meet and made our faces pale, and yet one point alone defeated us.

When we had read how the desired smile was kissed by one who was so true a lover, this one... who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled... kissed my mouth.

♪ That day, we read no more.

♪ Fazzini as Dante: And while one said these words to me, and the other wept, so that because of pity, I fainted, as if I had met my death, and then I fell as a dead body falls.

♪ Lombardi: Dante falls, and you are left, I find, with yourself for a moment.

But you also realize one thing-- Dante identifies himself with Francesca, and that you are witnessing the power of love literature.

♪ Ledda: The force of literature, love literature, made Francesca take this decision, this choice.

For this reason, Dante is so moved because, as implicated very strongly, he also could fall like Francesca in the same way because literature is a dangerous thing when you take it too literally, as Francesca does.

♪ Barolini: Dante is interested in how our desire moves us, how, as we go down the path of life, we're making choices.

He does believe, if you make the wrong choice, you're going to pay a consequence that's going to be eternal.

But desire is not, per se, bad; desire is the motor.

You're going nowhere without it.

It's what you do with it, and Francesca mishandled it.

Lombardi: This is the beginning of this long and very nuanced conversation on love and desire that Dante has throughout his poem that starts here.

Francesca, sadly, we leave her in Hell.

[Wind howling] ♪ [Thunder] [Rain falling] ♪ Narrator as Dante: I am in the third Circle, filled with cold, unending, heavy, and accursed rain; its measure and its kind are never changed.

Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow come streaking down across the shadowed air; the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.

♪ Over the souls of those submerged beneath that mess, is an outlandish, vicious beast, his 3 throats barking, doglike: Cerberus.

His eyes are blood red; greasy, black, his beard; his belly bulges, and his hands are claws, his talons tear and flay and rend the shades.

Bruscagli: The third Circle of Hell is the circle of the gluttons, and gluttons are treated like pigs in this Circle of Hell.

They lay down under a disgusting rain, and they roll in mud like, literally, pigs.

But it's not that these people are totally deprived of their humanity.

[Grunting] [Distant people screaming] [Spits] ♪ O, you who are conducted through this Hell... [Distant screaming continues] recall me, if you can; ♪ The name you citizens gave me was... Ciacco; ♪ and for the damning sin of gluttony, as you can see... [Grunts, pants] I languish in the rain.

Bruscagli: The person that Dante meets here in the Circle of the Gluttons is Ciacco.

Ciacco was a glutton, OK, but Ciacco is also the person who explains to Dante the moral corruption of Florence, so he speaks with dignity about what was going on in their city.

Narrator: As one of the dead, Ciacco has knowledge of what the future holds and is thus able to tell Dante of the horrific violence that will soon take place between the warring factions in Florence, the greed and corruption of whose unjust leaders has long since caused the city to descend into a hell of warring appetites.

♪ After long controversy, they'll come to blood; the uncouth party will chase the other out with much offense.

But then, within 3 suns, they too must fall; at which the other party will prevail... ♪ Two men are just, but no one listens to them.

[Chuckles] Three sparks that set on fire every heart are envy, pride, and avariciousness.

[Chuckles] [Coughs] [Sniffles] [Spits] [Sighs] Bruscagli: The "Divine Comedy" is full of predictions and prophecies about the future.

♪ Dante, in the narration of the "Divine Comedy," which is set in the year 1300, has not been exiled from Florence yet, but Dante the writer knows very well that this has happened.

This play between Dante the author, the writer, and Dante the protagonist, allows Dante a trick in his narration-- allows Dante to predict the future, and that creates a tension in the narrative because it is a narrative which is infused with anxiety about the future.

♪ Narrator: And so, they made their way down to the fourth Circle-- the circle of greed.

[Distant people screaming] There, pushing immense stones in anger and bitter pain, the souls of the greedy.

Spendthrifts and hoarders surged about the circle in great opposing tides of woe.

♪ In the next Circle down-- the fifth, the circle of the wrathful-- on the festering banks of another putrid river, the river Styx, naked souls, faces contorted with rage in the slime along the shore, snarled fiercely at each other and battered each other with their hands and heads.

♪ As they were ferried across the turbid river, Dante recognized, wallowing in the slime, an arrogant, foul-tempered nobleman named Filippo Argenti, who had once slapped Dante in the streets of Florence, and whose family had evicted his wife and children after he was exiled, who now, as Dante looked on in grim satisfaction, was set upon by a horde of angry sinners and then started to rip himself apart with his own teeth.

[Argenti snarling] Giunta: Dante was often very harsh with Florence and Florentines.

[Dante whispering indistinctly] Giunta: He's got a wonderful imagination, and the way he punishes his enemies is a part of the pleasure of reading the "Inferno" because he's quite imaginative in hate.

He was very good-- I will say A-plus--in hate.

♪ Narrator: Ahead now, on the far shore of the river Styx, loomed the menacing iron walls and towers of the City of Dis, named for the ancient Roman god of the underworld, beyond whose gates lay the hideous tiers and trenches of lower Hell.

Webb: When Dante talks about the entrance into the Gate of Dis, which takes us then into lower Hell, he's going places that Virgil himself had never gone, and that's where Dante gets into uncharted terrain and where much of this becomes Dante's own creation.

♪ Narrator: As they made their way inside the gates, they saw an endless vista of flaming, open tombs, with great sighs of pain and anguish arising from within.

They were in the sixth Circle of Hell now-- the circle of heretics-- and within the fiery, open tombs, Virgil explained, lay atheists and unbelievers-- all those who believed the soul dies with the body.

♪ Bruscagli: The irony for unbelievers-- who, during life, had thought everything ended with the grave-- is to awake after death to find their graves transformed into endless torture chambers.

And because an atheist, in their lives, were obsessed with earthly matters, they are condemned to their earthly obsessions forever.

Barolini: What Dante really gives us in the "Inferno" is the idea that we are our own consequence.

We are our own Hell, and later, in the poem, he actually has someone say, "As I was when I was alive, so am I now that I am dead."

♪ Adoyo: We have to go 11 cantos into the "Commedia" before we get any sort of orientation of where we're going.

We just seem to be descending unknowingly into a deeper and deeper abyss, but now we have just crossed the threshold into the City of Dis proper, and Virgil now gives us that picture and we get an elucidation, an intellectual elucidation, of where we're going.

Narrator: The rings of pain and suffering through which they have been descending, Virgil explained, were themselves ordered into 3 great divisions of increasing severity: the first and shallowest circles reserved for those who have committed sins of incontinence; a second, deeper set of circles for those who have committed sins of violence; and the deepest yet reserved for those who have committed sins of fraud.

Adoyo: Overlaying the physical organization of Hell is the ethical categorization of who is found where.

The sins at the very, very entrance of Inferno, the ones that are on the surface, that are farthest from the center of Hell, are categorized as sins of incontinence-- ungoverned appetite, unmitigated desire and impulses, where one allows oneself to be swept away.

You just let yourself go with the carnal desire or the pleasure of consumption or the pleasure of acquisition or the pleasure of just prodigality in the form of being able to just spend, spend, spend, but these are simply sins of appetite.

They're not, by their nature, meant to harm another.

♪ The next level is sins of violence, which is necessarily visited upon another.

And yet, here, Dante still does not correlate it with the desire to exploit or betray.

It is brute violence, brute violence against another, brute violence against self, brute violence against the divine.

But the third-- the deepest, the gravest-- category of sin is fraud; fraud when one exercises their intellect, which is the greatest gift, rooted together with free will the soul is endowed with, when one exercises their intellect to undermine the well-being of another in their self-interest.

And how is fraud perpetrated?

Through the word.

You tell somebody one thing that you know not to be true, with the understanding that the other person will believe you, so you have their trust and you violate that trust by communicating to them a big lie, essentially.

It points back to how it is that the word, how it is that language, is so potent an instrument both of creation and destruction, an instrument of nurturing and malice.

♪ As creative as words can be, as creative and generative and nurturing as language can be, so can it be destructive.

[Flames crackling] ♪ Narrator: Arriving now at the edge of a steep precipice, Dante and Virgil came to a halt.

They had come to the eighth Circle, a region of Hell called the Malebolge, the evil pits, comprised of 10 stony craters or chasms, each the infernal abode of a different kind of traitor to the truth: panderers and seducers, flatterers, corrupt politicians and priests, magicians and soothsayers, hypocrites, thieves, and fraudulent counselors.

Here, Virgil and Dante encountered the great Greek hero, Ulysses, whose craftiness and guile and cunningness in devising the Trojan Horse had brought about the fall of Troy.

Adoyo: Dante is giving us the incandescence of Ulysses' intelligence and the corruption of how he uses that intelligence to defraud, without any kind of ethical inhibitions about what the consequences of his actions might be.

♪ Narrator: As Dante stood transfixed, Ulysses himself began to speak, recounting how an unquenchable thirst for knowledge had propelled him to his doom.

♪ Ulysses: When I sailed away from Circe, who'd beguiled me to stay more than a year there, near Gaeta, neither my fondness for my son, nor the pity for my old father, nor the love I owed Penelope, which would have gladdened her, was able to defeat in me the longing I had to gain experience of the world.

Therefore, I set out on the open sea with but one ship and that small company of those who never had deserted me.

♪ "Brothers," I said, "O you, who having crossed "a hundred thousand dangers, "reach the west, "you must not deny experience "of that which lies beyond the sun "and of the world that is unpeopled.

"You were not made to live your lives as brutes, "but to be followers of worth and knowledge."

♪ I spurred my comrades with this brief address to meet the journey with such eagerness that I could hardly have held them back; 5 times the light beneath the moon had been rekindled... when there, before us, rose a mountain, dark because of distance, and it seemed to me the highest mountain I had ever seen.

[Thunder] And out of that new land, a whirlwind rose and hammered at our ship against her bow.

Three times it turned her round with all the waters; and at the fourth, it lifted up the stern so that the prow plunged deep... [Ship creaks] as pleased an Other... ♪ [Whispering] until the sea closed again over us.

♪ Pertile: Think of how many different ways there are of looking at some of Dante's major characters.

Look at Ulysses-- a hero of knowledge, a symbol of human yearning for discoveries on the one hand, on the other, a con artist, so it makes it impossible for us to make up our minds about these people.

♪ Perhaps the word "genius" applies to Dante in the most real sense of the word, but a genius aware, however, of the danger of his own genius, aware of the danger of his own intelligence.

There, again, you have the complexity of this author who is able to identify with the damned, and yet aims to reach and wants to reach Heaven and wants the good of everyone.

[Quill scrawling] ♪ Bruscagli: Towards the end of his journey, Dante finds a lake of ice, so Inferno at its deepest, at its darkest, is ice cold.

And the people who are punished, immersed in this ice, are the traitors; people who reciprocated the love that they received from their friends, from their relatives, from their fellow citizens, with hatred and treason.

And this is the worst sin, according to Dante.

♪ Narrator: The first of the 4 foul precincts of the ninth and final Circle of Hell, called Caina, was reserved for those who have betrayed their own kin, their own family, named for Cain, who had slaughtered his own brother.

Beyond that, amongst even worse betrayers, Dante saw something of unutterable horror in the ice.

♪ It was Count Ugolino, a notorious and nefarious politician without scruples, violent and coldblooded, locked in ice and forever gnawing on the head of his arch enemy, the Archbishop Ruggiero, a man just as bad as Ugolino himself.

♪ And yet even here, near the very bottom of Hell, even this horrific figure could not be reduced to the sum of his terrible sins, but remained a man who was once a human being, a father, who had starved to death watching his own sons die in the same cruel and terrible way.

♪ Ugolino: I looked into the faces of my sons.

Out of my grief, I bit at both my hands, and they, who thought I'd done that out of hunger, immediately rose and told me, "Father, "it will be far less painful "if you ate of us; "for you clothed us in this sad flesh.

It is for you to strip it off."

♪ After we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo implored me: "Father, why do you not help me?"

And there he died.

And just as you see me, I saw my sons falling one by one, between the fifth day and the sixth; at which, now blind, I started groping over each, and after they were dead, I called them for two days... then fasting had more force than grief.

♪ Bruscagli: Dante knows that the humanity of the characters that he encounters in Hell is larger than their evil.

And so, so many times, he can relate to the humanity of these people-- not against their sin, not because he thinks that they didn't deserve to be there, but because they cannot be reduced just to the horror of their sins.

♪ Narrator: Dante and Virgil moved on, moving inward and down, ever deeper, nearer and nearer to the center of Hell, where the souls were even more deeply covered in ice.

[Thunder] The anguished shades of those who have betrayed their own guests, their faces up, frozen tears blinding them in agony.

[Thunder] ♪ And then at last, they were approaching the very pit of Hell itself--Judecca-- and the souls of those who'd betrayed their own benefactors; piteous figures completely immersed in the ice, sometimes many feet deep.

♪ [Thunder] And in the distance now, Dante and Virgil could just make out a towering shape, shrouded in fog.

Here, at the very bottom of the world, they've come at last to Lucifer himself.

A Lucifer, a Satan, unlike anything anyone had ever imagined before or since.

Narrator as Dante: O reader, do not ask of me how I grew faint and frozen then-- I cannot write it: all words would fall far short of what it was.

I did not die, and I was not alive; think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived of life and death.

The emperor of the despondent kingdom towered from the ice, up from mid-chest.

If he was once as handsome as he now is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows against his Maker, one can understand how every sorrow has its source in him.

I marveled when I saw that, on his head, he had 3 faces: one in front, blood red; and then another two that, just above the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first; and at the crown, all 3 were reattached; the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white; the left in its appearance was like those who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.

♪ Adoyo: Dante's Lucifer-- this grossly deformed, bat-winged, immobile creature-- is completely impotent to free himself from the frozen prison in which he's locked.

This is the coldest place; there's no life, there's no heat, there's no--nothing, and so, every time he flaps his wings, every draft that he creates only makes the waters colder and freezes them even harder.

Bruscagli: Lucifer doesn't even react to the presence of Virgil and Dante.

There is no exchange.

He's so impossible to reach in the absolute negativity of his hatred and his ugliness that there is no possible relation with him.

Narrator as Dante: He wept out of 6 eyes; and down 3 chins, tears gushed together with a bloody froth.

Within each mouth-- he used it like a grinder-- with gnashing teeth, he tore to bits a sinner, so that he brought much pain to three at once.

The forward sinner found that biting nothing when matched against the clawing, for at times, his back was stripped completely of its hide.

Bruscagli: Lucifer is tormenting the 3 worst sinners of all time: Cassius and Brutus-- the traitors of Caesar-- and Judas, the traitor of Jesus Christ.

Narrator as Dante: "That soul up there who has to suffer most," my master said: "Judas Iscariot-- "his head inside, he jerks his legs without.

"Of those two others, with their heads beneath, "the one who hangs from that black snout "is Brutus-- "see how he writhes and does not say a word!

"That other, who seems so robust, is Cassius."

"But night is come again, "and it is time for us to leave; we have seen everything."

♪ Webb: In the end, we come to realize there's no principle of evil in Dante's Hell.

It's not that there are forces of evil that draw us to do evil things.

It's the decisions we make that lead us away from the good.

♪ For Dante, it's about the good, it's about love.

As you get farther away from those things, what you end up with--simply the lack of love, the lack of good, and that's what we see epitomized in Lucifer.

♪ Narrator: And with that, the journey through Inferno now came to an end.

♪ Bruscagli: The way Dante and Virgil exit Inferno is they actually climb down in this space between the body of Lucifer and the ice, grabbing the hairs of Lucifer's body.

Webb: There's this tricky shift on the way out of Hell, where Virgil grabs Dante and climbs down Lucifer's body and then turns around and climbs up.

Bruscagli: And Dante doesn't understand what's going on.

The fact is that they arrived at the center of the earth, and now they have to climb up in order to exit Inferno.

♪ Narrator: Slipping through a crevice in a rock, Virgil placed Dante on a ledge by Satan's feet and bade him continue their upward journey towards the other side of the world, where, a little before dawn, they finally saw a gleam of light at the end of the dark, rocky tunnel.

♪ Bruscagli: And through there, Virgil and Dante are able to leave the realm of evil and re-emerge on the shore of the mountain of Purgatory on the other hemisphere.

♪ Narrator: It was on the morning of Easter Sunday, April 10, 1300, when they emerged once more to see the stars.

They had come out at last on the other side of the world, at the foot of Mount Purgatory, the great mountain that had risen where Lucifer, in his catastrophic fall, had pierced the earth.

♪ And even as Virgil and Dante were physically disentangling themselves from the timeless, unchanging entropy and absolute negation of Hell, so Dante himself was beginning to disentangle himself from the grip Florence had continued to hold over him-- even in exile.

Sometime in 1307 or 1308, as he neared the end of "Inferno"-- the first, dark canticle of his poem--he left the benevolent protection of the Count of Malaspina, and with the only extant manuscript of the completed cantos in a rucksack on his back, made his way east toward Casentino, where, at Poppi, near Arezzo, by the battlefield of Campaldino, where he had fought nearly two decades earlier, he hoped to find protection under another local lord, and where, by 1309, with Hell behind him, he would set to work on the next great canticle of his poem: "Purgatorio."

Time had begun again.

My sins were ghastly ♪ Webb: Dante manages to convey all of the range of human experience.

You are not on the Earth as you believe.

Pertile: He acknowledges the existence of this Paradiso beyond space and beyond time.

♪ Announcer: To order "Dante: Inferno to Paradise" on DVD, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

This program is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

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