On March 25, 2021, in a letter to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death, Pope Francis called the Italian poet "a prophet of hope." That may surprise readers who best know Dante for his Inferno, a celebrated account of his passage into the underworld — a hell with nine circles, each more terrible than the last. 

Inferno is the opening of Dante's three-part masterpiece The Divine Comedy, which is widely considered one of literature's greatest works, up there with Shakespeare and the Bible. Written in the vernacular Italian of the 1300s, it has been translated into English more than 100 times in the past century.