On Holy Week of 1300, the Jubilee year, Dante, midway through the journey of life, finds himself in a dark wood without knowing how he entered it, and cannot climb the sunlit mountain he sees ahead. The Roman poet Virgil, whom he holds as his master, comes to his aid and proposes a longer path: to cross the Inferno, the kingdom of the damned, and come out on the other side. The canticle is this descent through nine circles, which Dante recounts in the first person and which moves him, at first, by fear of remaining in the wood and, afterward, by the will to see and understand each sin, down to the bottom, where one leaves only by passing through the body of Lucifer.
Cantos I to IV: The Forest and the Gate
Dante is blocked on the climb of the mountain by a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf; the she-wolf, who is never sated, drives him back into the wood (canto I). Virgil appears, says the she-wolf will die only when the Veltro comes, a future deliverer, and proposes to guide him through the Inferno. Dante hesitates, for he does not consider himself worthy of a journey that only Aeneas and Paul have made, and Virgil tells him that it was Beatrice, sent by Lucia and by a lady of heaven, who came down to Limbo to ask that he guide him; Dante rises, full of confidence (canto II). They reach the gate of the Inferno, which bids them abandon all hope, and pass through the vestibule, where those who lived without infamy and without praise run after a banner, rejected by heaven and by the deep hell. Charon refuses to carry a living man across the Acheron, Virgil silences him, and Dante falls as one who falls asleep (canto III). He wakes in the first circle, Limbo, where those who did not sin but were not baptized are, without torment, with Virgil among them; Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan make Dante the sixth among them, and from the height of a meadow he sees heroes and philosophers before Virgil leads him into the dark air of the second circle (canto IV).
Cantos V to VIII: The Incontinent
In the second circle, Minos judges the souls and sends them to the circle that is theirs, and a tempest that never stops sweeps the lustful. Moved by pity, Dante speaks with two who go together, Francesca and her companion, whom the tradition calls Paolo; she tells that love held them, that a kiss overcame them as they read together the story of Lancelot, and that Caina awaits whoever killed them. The other weeps as she speaks, and Dante falls like a dead body (canto V). In the third circle, a cold, eternal rain falls on the gluttonous, whom Cerberus flays; the Florentine Ciacco predicts the ruin of Florence, divided by pride, envy, and avarice (canto VI). In the fourth, the hoarders and the spendthrifts roll weights with their chests and accuse one another, and Virgil explains Fortune as the minister God set to shift goods from one people to another (canto VII). In the fifth, those whom wrath overcame strike one another in the mud of the Styx, and the boatman Phlegyas ferries the poets by boat to the city of Dis. On the way, Filippo Argenti asks who comes before his time; Dante curses him, Argenti stretches his hands to the boat, Dante says he would like to see him sunk, and Virgil praises him. More than a thousand fallen from heaven shut the gates of Dis against Virgil, who returns with lowered eyes and promises that help is already coming down the slope (canto VIII).
Cantos IX to XII: The City of Dis
Before the closed gates, three Furies appear on the tower and call for Medusa; Virgil orders Dante to turn his face away and covers his eyes with his own hands. An angel crosses the Styx dry-footed and opens the gate with a wand, without offering any explanation (canto IX). Inside, in a field of tombs ablaze, lie the heretics. Farinata degli Uberti rises from his tomb as if the Inferno were a minor matter, and discusses politics with Dante; beside him, the father of the poet Guido Cavalcanti asks about his son and, on hearing Dante speak of him in the past tense, concludes that he is dead, falls on his back, and does not reappear (canto X). On the edge of an abyss, while they wait for the stench to pass, Virgil explains how the Inferno is ordered: violence and fraud, and fraud weighs more (canto XI). They descend through the landslide, pass the Minotaur, and reach the river of blood, where the centaurs shoot whoever rises out of the blood more than his guilt allows, and Nessus guides them across the ford (canto XII).
Cantos XIII to XVII: The Violent
In the second round of the seventh circle, the suicides have become trees in a wood without paths, where the Harpies feed on the leaves. Dante breaks off a branch, the trunk bleeds and speaks: it is, according to the tradition, Pier delle Vigne, chancellor of Frederick II, who killed himself after falling into disgrace through the envy of others (canto XIII). In the third round, a rain of fire falls on barren sand, and Capaneus, who defied Jupiter, cries out that he is still the same as he was alive; Virgil explains that the rivers of the Inferno are born from the tears of an old man of Crete (canto XIV). On the bank of a stream, Dante recognizes his former master, Brunetto Latini, who predicts the enmity of Florence and hands him the Tesoro as the only good left to him (canto XV). Three Florentine knights ask that Dante speak of them when he returns to the stars, and Virgil asks for the cord Dante wore and hurls it into the abyss (canto XVI). From the abyss rises Geryon, with the face of a just man and the body of a serpent; Dante sees the usurers, each with a purse hanging from his neck, and the two descend on the beast's back (canto XVII).
Cantos XVIII to XXII: The First Five Ditches
Geryon leaves them at Malebolge, the eighth circle, cut into ten ditches of dark stone. In the first, demons flog the seducers, such as Venedico Caccianemico, who brought Ghisolabella to a marquis; in the second, the flatterers are submerged in excrement (canto XVIII). In the third, the simoniacs are stuck head down in holes, with their feet on fire; one of them, whom the tradition reads as Pope Nicholas III, mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII, and Dante rebukes him for selling what belongs to God (canto XIX). In the fourth, the soothsayers walk with their faces turned toward their backs; Dante weeps, and Virgil rebukes him (canto XX). In the fifth, pitch boils over those who sold public offices, guarded by the Malebranche, ten demons whom Malacoda orders to escort the poets (canto XXI). A Navarrese, caught on a hook, tricks the guards and slips free, and two demons, fighting over him, fall into the pitch (canto XXII).
Cantos XXIII to XXVI: Hypocrites, Thieves, and Ulysses
Fleeing the demons, the poets descend to the sixth ditch, where the hypocrites walk under gilded cloaks on the outside and leaden ones within; a friar contradicts what Malacoda had said about the way, and on the ground, crucified, lies the one who advised putting one man to death for the people (canto XXIII). In the seventh, serpents sting the thieves; Vanni Fucci, who robbed a sacristy, predicts to Dante the defeat of the Whites so that he will suffer (canto XXIV), and ends by raising his fists in defiance against God. Of three thieves, two merge or exchange their forms with serpents while the third remains as he was, in a challenge from Dante to Lucan and Ovid (canto XXV). In the eighth, each fraudulent counselor burns within his own flame, and in one of them, its tip forked, are Ulysses and Diomedes. Ulysses tells how, after leaving Circe, he persuaded his companions to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules in search of virtue and knowledge, and how a whirlwind sank them in sight of a mountain (canto XXVI).
Cantos XXVII to XXX: Guido, Mahomet, the Forgers
The flame of Guido da Montefeltro speaks only because he thinks no one returns from the depths to tell of it; he says he was a soldier and then a Franciscan friar, and that the pope, whom the tradition reads as Boniface VIII, absolved him before the sin in exchange for a fraudulent counsel, but a devil carried him off all the same (canto XXVII). In the ninth ditch, a demon hacks the sowers of discord, among them Mahomet, split open from chin to belly; Mosca, whose counsel the tradition links to the division of Florence into factions; and Bertran de Born, who carries his severed head by the hair, like a lantern (canto XXVIII). Dante wants to keep looking, Virgil hurries him, and Virgil says he saw Geri del Bello from afar, a relative of Dante, pointing at him with his finger; Dante understands that he passed without speaking because he died unavenged. In the last ditch, the forgers lie diseased (canto XXIX). Master Adam, a forger of coins, and Sinon, the Greek who deceived Troy, trade blows and insults; Dante listens to them with such pleasure that Virgil rebukes him in anger, and his shame is such that the guide says it washes away a greater fault (canto XXX).
Cantos XXXI to XXXIV: The Ice and Lucifer
In the well that closes Malebolge, giants guard the rim, and Antaeus, who is loose, lifts Virgil and Dante and sets them at the bottom (canto XXXI). The ninth circle is a lake of ice, Cocytus, where the traitors are held, down to the point where shame appears: in Caina, those who betrayed their kin; in Antenora, those who betrayed their homeland, where Dante steps on a head and tears the hair of Bocca to learn his name (canto XXXII). Count Ugolino gnaws the head of Archbishop Ruggieri and tells how he died of hunger, with his sons, in the tower; in Ptolomea, Fra Alberigo asks that the ice be removed from his eyes, and Dante promises and does not keep his word (canto XXXIII). At the center is Lucifer, with three faces, who chews Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Virgil and Dante descend clinging to his fur, pass the point toward which everything is drawn, where the body turns upside down, climb a dark path, and come out to see the stars again (canto XXXIV).