Prologue
The Dark Wood
Cantos I – II
Before Hell proper, Dante loses his way, is rescued by Virgil, and doubts his own worthiness for the journey — until Virgil reveals who sent him.
Canto One
The Dark Wood — The Three Beasts — Virgil
A man wakes in darkness at the middle of his life, is driven back by three beasts, and a shade offers to guide him another way.
Canto Two
Dante's Doubt — Beatrice's Commission
On the threshold of the journey, Dante falters — and Virgil tells him who sent him, and why.
The Vestibule of Hell
The Neutrals — those who took no side in the great moral conflict of existence
Canto Three
The Gate of Hell — The Neutrals — Charon
The inscription above the gate, the miserable souls who chose nothing, and the ferryman of the dead.
Limbo
The virtuous unbaptized — those who lived well but without the faith that saves
Canto Four
Limbo — The Great Pagans
The first circle holds the wisest and most virtuous of the ancient world — not in torment, but in the permanent grief of what they lack.
Lust
Those who let carnal desire master reason — swept forever by a storm they could not master in life
Canto Five
Minos — The Storm — Paolo and Francesca
The great judge assigns souls to their eternal place, and two lovers caught in adultery tell the story that made them famous forever.
Gluttony
Those who made appetite an end in itself — lying in filth, blind to each other, under eternal cold rain
Canto Six
Cerberus — Ciacco's Prophecy
The three-headed hound guards the gluttons in their rain-soaked misery, and a Florentine prophesies his city's ruin.
Avarice & Prodigality
Those who hoarded all, and those who squandered all — condemned to crash against each other for eternity
Canto Seven
Plutus — The Hoarders and Wasters — Fortune
Two crowds of souls push boulders against each other in endless collision, and Virgil explains the nature of Fortune.
Wrath & Sullenness
The wrathful tear each other on the surface of the Styx; the sullen choke in its muddy depths
Canto Eight
The Styx — Filippo Argenti — The City of Dis
Dante refuses pity for a proud Florentine and watches him torn apart, then the gates of a burning city slam shut in their faces.
Canto Nine
The Furies — The Heavenly Messenger — The Heretics' Plain
Three monstrous women call for Medusa's head to freeze Dante in stone, and salvation comes from Heaven to open what Hell refused.
Heresy
Those who denied the immortality of the soul — interred in burning tombs, their lids not yet sealed
Canto Ten
Farinata degli Uberti — Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti
A great Ghibelline enemy and a tender father speak to Dante from their burning tomb in the most politically and personally charged scene in the Inferno.
Canto Eleven
The Structure of Hell — Aristotle's Ethics
Pausing behind a tomb because of the stench below, Virgil delivers the complete moral map of Hell.
Canto Twelve
The Minotaur — The River of Blood — The Violent Against Others
They descend a shattered cliff past the Minotaur into a river of boiling blood where tyrants and murderers are submerged to varying depths.
Violence
Three rings: violence against others (blood river), against self (the wood of suicides), and against God, nature, and art (the burning plain)
Canto Thirteen
The Wood of Suicides — Pier della Vigna
A dark thorned wood where the suicides have been transformed into trees, and a great minister who killed himself tells his side of the story.
Canto Fourteen
The Burning Plain — Capaneus — The Old Man of Crete
Flakes of fire rain on the violent against God, and a giant of unbroken defiance refuses to bow even in eternity.
Canto Fifteen
Brunetto Latini — The Gift and the Wound
Dante's greatest teacher and mentor runs in the circle of the sodomites and offers his blessing — and his prophecy of exile.
Canto Sixteen
Three Florentine Soldiers — Geryon Summoned
Three proud warriors run in the fire and ask news of Florence, and a monster of fraud is summoned from the deep.
Canto Seventeen
The Usurers — The Flight on Geryon
Contemptible men crouch over their money-pouches even in Hell, and then Geryon carries them through the air into the dark.
The Evil Ditches
Ten concentric ditches for ten varieties of fraud against those with no special bond of trust — the fraudulent and the false
Canto Eighteen
Bolgia 1 & 2 — Panderers, Seducers, Flatterers
Whips drive the pimps and seducers in an eternal march, and the flatterers choke in human excrement.
Canto Nineteen
Bolgia 3 — The Simoniacs — Pope Nicholas III
Popes are planted headfirst in holes in the rock, their feet on fire, and one delivers a speech that illuminates everything wrong with the Church.
Canto Twenty
Bolgia 4 — The Diviners and Soothsayers
Those who claimed to see the future now walk forever with their heads wrenched backward, weeping into the cracks of their own buttocks.
Canto Twenty-One
Bolgia 5 — The Barrators — The Malebranche
A demon arrives with a corrupt magistrate on his shoulder, and the devils of the ditch offer an escort Dante should not trust.
Canto Twenty-Two
Ciampolo — The Demons' Brawl
A barrator from Navarre tricks his demon guards, two of them fall into the pitch, and Dante and Virgil flee in the confusion.
Canto Twenty-Three
Bolgia 6 — The Hypocrites — Caiaphas Crucified
The hypocrites walk in gilded lead cloaks that crush them, and the high priest who condemned Christ lies crucified on the ground for all of them to walk over.
Canto Twenty-Four
Bolgia 7 — The Thieves — The Serpent Transformations Begin
Serpents entwine the thieves and transform them through violent and grotesque metamorphoses — punished in the very image of what theft does to identity.
Canto Twenty-Five
The Metamorphoses — Cacus — The Five Florentines
The most elaborate and grotesque transformations in the poem: thieves and serpents merge, exchange forms, and dissolve into each other.
Canto Twenty-Six
Bolgia 8 — Ulysses — The Last Voyage
The greatest speech in the Inferno: Ulysses tells of the voyage he made beyond all human boundaries — and what waited at the end.
Canto Twenty-Seven
Guido da Montefeltro — The Counsel of the Pope
A warrior-turned-friar was promised absolution before the sin — and a devil explains why that doesn't work.
Canto Twenty-Eight
Bolgia 9 — The Sowers of Discord — Bertran de Born
The sowers of schism are split and sliced — their bodies opened as they opened societies — and the greatest image in the Inferno carries his own severed head like a lantern.
Canto Twenty-Nine
Bolgia 10 — The Falsifiers Begin — Griffolino and Capocchio
Dante lingers too long at the sight of the mutilated dead, and the alchemists lie diseased and scratching in the last ditch.
Canto Thirty
The Impersonators — Counterfeiters — Master Adam's Lament
The mad shades who falsified persons and coin run through the ditch, and two souls argue each other into a hell within Hell — with Virgil's rebuke at the end.
The Frozen Lake
Treachery in its four degrees — the deepest and coldest place in all creation, where the complete withdrawal of love becomes ice
Canto Thirty-One
The Giants — Nimrod — Antaeus
Enormous figures stand in the pit around the frozen lake like towers in fog, and the last of them gently sets Dante and Virgil down into the deepest circle.
Canto Thirty-Two
Caina — Antenora — Count Ugolino
The frozen lake holds traitors in ice to their necks, and a man who gnaws another's skull explains why.
Canto Thirty-Three
Ugolino's Tower — Fra Alberigo — Souls on Earth
The most horrifying story in the Inferno: a father watches his children starve to death — and a friar reveals that some living bodies are already empty.
Canto Thirty-Four
Lucifer — Judecca — The Climb Out
At the exact center of the universe, the Emperor of the Kingdom of Grief chews the three greatest traitors in history — and then comes the slow, strange climb back out to the stars.