Original subtitles

[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.

♪

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♪