Dante the pilgrim and Virgil leave Hell at dawn of Holy Week 1300 and reach the shore of an island, at the foot of a mountain that they climb through seven ledges, where souls purge misdirected love, up to the Earthly Paradise. Dante tells the ascent in the first person, and time matters: one does not climb at night, the souls are in a hurry, and the mountain weighs at the start and eases with each step. Virgil guides as far as reason reaches; at the summit, the one who receives Dante is Beatrice.
Cantos I to IV: The shore and Ante-Purgatory
On the shore, an old guardian, whom tradition takes for Cato, asks who has escaped the eternal prison. Virgil says that a lady of heaven sent him and that Dante seeks liberty; the old man refuses the request in the name of Marcia, his wife, yields to the name of the lady, and orders Dante girded with a rush and his face washed (canto I). A boat arrives steered by an angel, with souls singing the psalm of the exodus from Egypt. Dante tries to embrace his friend Casella, closes his hands on air three times, and asks him for the song that used to ease his sorrows; everyone forgets the way, until Cato shouts that they should run to the mountain and strip off what keeps them from seeing God (canto II). At the foot of the rock, Manfred, grandson of Empress Constance, tells that he surrendered weeping, wounded, to the one who forgives gladly, and that the wait of one who dies excommunicated is thirty times the length of his presumption (canto III). The poets climb through the cleft in the rock, and Dante recognizes Belacqua, seated, arms around his knees, who says that heaven must turn as long as his delay lasted in life (canto IV).
Cantos V to VIII: Those who repented late
The souls of those who died by force, who repented and forgave at the last instant, ask Dante to remember them to the living. One asks for prayers in Fano; Buonconte tells how an angel and a demon disputed his soul and how the demon, having no power over it, stirred the rain that carried his body to the Arno; Pia asks only that they remember her (canto V). Dante asks Virgil whether prayer bends the decree of heaven and hears that the fire of love accomplishes in an instant what satisfaction demanded; a Lombard soul rises at the name of Mantua and introduces himself as Sordello, and the embrace of the two compatriots launches the invective against Italy, the Church, Emperor Albert and Florence (canto VI). Sordello greets Virgil as the glory of the Latins, draws on the ground the line that night prevents from being crossed, and leads the poets to the flowering valley where the negligent princes wait (canto VII). At nightfall, two angels with blunt swords descend to guard the valley; Dante meets the judge Nino, who asks for his daughter's prayer, and the serpent flees at the sound of wings; Conrad Malaspina prophesies that Dante's praise of his house will be nailed to his head by deeds (canto VIII).
Cantos IX to XII: The gate and pride
Dante sleeps in the valley and Lucia carries him in her arms to the gate, as Virgil tells him when he wakes him. An angel with a naked sword marks seven P's on Dante's forehead, opens with the keys of Peter, and warns that whoever looks back goes out again (canto IX). On the first ledge, the marble wall bears carved images of the Annunciation, David before the ark, and Trajan attending a widow, and the proud appear bent under stones (canto X). They recite an Our Father, and two of them speak: Omberto, whom the nobility of his blood made despise all men, and the miniaturist Oderisi, who gives the glory to his rival Franco and tells that Provenzano Salvani escaped the wait by humbling himself in the square of Siena to ransom a friend (canto XI). On the floor are figured falls of pride, from Lucifer to Troy in ashes; an angel erases one P, and Dante discovers with his fingers that six remain (canto XII).
Cantos XIII to XVI: Envy and wrath
On the second ledge, the envious have their eyelids sewn shut with iron wire and lean against the rock, and voices that pass teach love for enemies. Sapia, of Siena, tells that she rejoiced more at her people's defeat at Colle than at her own fortune and cried out to God that she no longer feared him (canto XIII). Guido del Duca, for whom it was enough to see a man joyful to turn pale, makes an inventory of vices out of the valley of the Arno and Romagna (canto XIV). Virgil explains that divine good grows as it is shared, as the ray comes to a luminous body, and Dante has three visions of meekness: the mother who rebukes her son, the lord who refuses to avenge his daughter, and the young man who prays for those who stone him (canto XV). In the smoke of the third ledge, Marco Lombardo says that heaven starts the movements but not all of them, that men are given light and free will, and that the world goes badly through bad government: Rome had two suns, and the sword joined the crozier (canto XVI).
Cantos XVII to XXI: Love, sloth and avarice
Standing on the stairs, Virgil answers the question about the offense of that circling with the doctrine of love: neither creator nor creature was ever without love; natural love does not err, and the love of the mind can err through a bad object, or through too little or too much vigor (canto XVII). Dante objects that if love comes from outside there is no merit; Virgil answers with the power to hold back love and leaves the rest to Beatrice, and in the night a crowd of the slothful passes running and shouting examples of zeal (canto XVIII). Dante dreams of an ugly woman whom his gaze turns into a siren, until Virgil undoes her; on the fifth circle the avaricious lie face down, among them a pope (tradition reads Adrian V) who wanted another life only when he felt the weight of the mantle (canto XIX). Hugh Capet calls himself the root of the evil plant that shadows Christendom and accuses his own descendants; at the end, the mountain trembles (canto XX). Statius explains that the mountain trembles when a soul feels itself cleansed and wants to rise, tells that after five hundred years he felt his will free, and says that the Aeneid was mother and nurse to his poetry; Dante reveals who his guide is (canto XXI).
Cantos XXII to XXV: Gluttony and the generation of the soul
Statius tells Virgil that he was prodigal and not avaricious, that a line of Virgil's corrected him, and that the fourth eclogue made him a Christian, baptized but silent for fear for a long time (canto XXII). Souls thin with hunger pass singing, and Dante recognizes Forese Donati only by his voice; Forese tells that the punishment is a consolation and that the tears of his widow Nella pulled him from the slope of the wait (canto XXIII). Bonagiunta, of Lucca, asks whether Dante is the author of "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," and recognizes, in the reply, the knot that held him, the sweet new style; Forese prophesies the ruin of whoever is most at fault in the city (canto XXIV). Dante asks how one grows thin where one does not eat, and Statius explains the generation of the soul, the breath of the first mover and the body of air of the shade; on the seventh circle the souls walk in the fire singing a hymn and shouting examples of chastity (canto XXV).
Cantos XXVI to XXIX: The fire and Eden
On the ledge of lust, two bands of shades meet in the fire, kiss quickly and shout, each one, the example of his own error. One shade introduces himself as Guido Guinizelli; Dante, who calls him father, gazes at him a long time without approaching because of the fire; Guinizelli points to Arnaut Daniel as the better craftsman of the mother tongue, and Arnaut answers in Provençal that he weeps and goes on singing (canto XXVI). Dante stands motionless before the wall of fire until Virgil says that between him and Beatrice lies that wall; in the morning, on the last step, Virgil says that Dante's free choice is upright and whole, and crowns and mitres him over himself (canto XXVII). In the Earthly Paradise, a woman who sings while gathering flowers explains that the place was given to man as a pledge of eternal peace, and that the river has two waters, the Lethe, which takes away the memory of sin, and the Eunoe, which restores the memory of good (canto XXVIII). A light runs through the forest and brings seven candelabra, twenty-four elders, four animals and a chariot drawn by a griffin, until a thunderclap halts the procession before Dante (canto XXIX).
Cantos XXX to XXXIII: Beatrice
A woman appears in a cloud of flowers; Dante feels the old love without recognizing her, turns to tell Virgil, and does not find him. Beatrice calls him by name, the only time in the poem, says that he must weep for another sword, and accuses him: after she died, he followed false images of good, so deeply that only showing him the lost people remained (canto XXX). Dante confesses that present things led him astray when her face was hidden; Matelda immerses him in the Lethe, and the ladies lead him to the eyes of Beatrice, where the griffin appears now one way, now another (canto XXXI). Seated at the root of the tree, Beatrice orders him to write what he sees of the chariot, which is attacked by an eagle, a fox and a dragon and ends transformed into a monster, with a harlot and a giant (canto XXXII). Beatrice prophesies, in an obscure number, that a messenger of God will kill the thief and the giant, uses the forgetfulness of the Lethe as proof of guilt, and hands Dante over to Matelda, who leads him to the Eunoe; he returns renewed, pure and ready to rise to the stars (canto XXXIII).