Inferno: The Divine Comedy I

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Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was born in Florence and is considered Italy's greatest poet. It is believed that the Divine Comedy-comprising the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso-was written between 1308 and 1320. Robin Kirkpatrick is Professor of Italian and English literature at the University of Cambridge and has written a number of books on Dante and on the Renaissance.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful and tactile cloth. Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.

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