Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante plunges to the very depths of Hell and embarks on his arduous journey towards God. Together they descend through the nine circles of the underworld and encounter the tormented souls of the damned - from heretics and pagans to gluttons, criminals and seducers - who tell of their sad fates and predict events still to come in Dante's life. In this first part of his Divine Comedy, Dante fused satire and humour with intellect and soaring passion to create an immortal Christian allegory of mankind's search for self-knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. This story begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year of our Lord 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense re-creation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.