As every Italian schoolchild knows, Dante Alighieri’s allegorical journey from Hell to Heaven by way of Purgatory, The Divine Comedy, opens on Good Friday in a supernatural forest at nightfall. Dante, a figure in his own epic work, has lost his way in ­middle age and is alone and terrified in the “dark wood”. The classical poet Virgil, sent by Dante’s muse Beatrice, is about to show him Hell. Dante was born 750 years ago in Florence in 1265. How has his poem managed to survive so long? As a singer of brimstone horrors, the Florentine poet belongs to a pre-Renaissance world of infernal retribution, where the pitchforks and devilry of Hell were a medieval reality. If Dante speaks to our present condition, it is because he wrote the epic of Everyman in search of s