Inferno

The place is described in detail by Dante, who had saved everything Vergilius and other ancient authors had to say in the matter. To Dante hell is situated in the center of earth straight below Jerusalem. It consists of an enormous tunnel which is getting more and more narrow the closer it gets to the center of the earth.

The topography is as follows: There are ravines and clefts, roads and rivers, firelights that cast shadows and echoing depths. There are nine circles and they are as follow:

First circle
Limbus - where the unbaptized children and the virtous heathens is making the air to tremble with their sighs, because they are living in hopeless desire, but darkness and pain does not affect them.

Second circle
Is stopped upwards by the river Acheron, the voluptuous' spirits is whining, carried by a whirlwind as starlings.

Third circle
Its inhabitants are glutters, whipped by ice-cold rain and they are howling like dogs.

Fourth circle
Greedy ones and squanderers; they are loading each other with heavy weights while arguing.

Fifth circle
Filled of the Stix-swamp's mud and is populated of angry spirits and of spiritually depressed ones.

Sixth circle
Here is the city of Hell, surrounded by the river Styx, which walls inhabits the four lower circles. Heretics and followers of philosophic teachings are fried here in the sixth circle.

Seventh circle
is surrounded by the fire-river Phlegethon which is accomodating tyrants, murderers and robbers, blasphemers, sodomites and usurers, divided on three circles and exposed to a never ending fire-rain; a brushwood of bushes which are suicides are seperating the circles and are populated by harpies and furious black dogs. The river Phlegethon are rushing down a gulf with an enormous crash down to the underlying circles where it is building Kokytos' ice-puddle.

Eighth circle
This circle is known as Malebolge, and there is the place where the demons work doing all sorts of torture with different instruments; punishing procurers, seducers, flatterers, fortune-tellers, hypocrites, thieves, evil advisors, traitors as well as forgerers in different clefts with the use of faeces, scourge, boiling pitch, flames, snakes, scabies and other things.

Ninth circle
In this last circle of hell traitors of different sorts are kept, ordered in four circles known as Caïna, Antenora, Ptolemea and Guidecca.

The Pit
At the bottom, the center of the earth, is Satan's domain and he's sitting here producing ice-coolness by faning three pairs of bat-wings at the same time as he with three different-colored jaws are chewing on Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iskariot.

Dante's Inferno

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a firey Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd
For those rebellious, here their prison ordain'd
In utter darkness and their portion set
As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n
As from the center thrice to th' utmost Pole

. . .

Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor; One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at last
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition through in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n!

- Milton, Paradise Lost