When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the page like centuries of snow. Dante would be horrified.

Ignoring the opinions of academics and slogging my way through the translated poem, this is a groundbreaking piece of creativity. Dante the author was convicted and sentenced to death by burning on invented charges. He fled his native Florence and never gets to return. In the poem Dante the character, one of literature's most famous self-inserts, considers suicide because of his miserable circumstances. The spirit of the Roman poet Virgil appears to Dante at the request of Dante's great unconsummated love, the deceased Lady Beatrice.

Virgil and Dante travel together as they descend into the circles of hell (Inferno) where Dante meets murdered adulterers forever tossed around by the hurricane winds of lust. Gluttons drowning in excrement. Betrayers feeding on each other and even Satan himself. Climbing down the frozen body of Satan, they pass through the centre of the world and "climb up" one of his legs where they exit onto the shores of purgatory.

In the second book, Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil summit Mount Purgatory. A climb of spiritual rebirth where those capable of change work on overcoming whichever of the seven deadly sins they were guilty of in life. The climb up the cornices of Mount Purgatory is difficult and this is where some readers fall away. After the grotesque punishments of the first book this book presents hopeful struggles that can make a reader melancholy. Purgatory is for the flawed, you may see yourself working your way through a penance for decades in the hope of reaching paradise. I found the second book to be the most..human.

The final book, Paradiso, is a leap into the divine. A literal leap as Dante flies from the summit of Mount Purgatory and journeys through the nine spheres of heaven. A mortal visitor allowed to question the nature of God, faith, hope and love. This book is heavy on the theology and gets more abstract the closer Dante gets to becoming part of the eternal. Dante the author does a great job conveying what a mortal mind might think it sees the closer it gets to God.

Like Dante's own journey, making it from Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso was a journey for me. It was a good one. Should you read it? If you feel you need to. You need an internal motivation to sustain you through works like this. I closed a page somewhere on Mount Purgatory decades ago and it took all this time to come back, start again and get to the end. I don't regret the wait; I was finally ready to start and finish.