Dante Alighieri 
The vision of hell 
By Dante Alighieri. / Translated by Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M.A. / and illustrated with the seventy-five designs of Gustave Doré

The Vision of Hell, or Dante’s Inferno by Dante Alighieri describes Dante’s journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the ‚realm … of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen.‘ Excerpt: ‚In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell It was no easy task, how savage wild That forest…‘