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?"