It is not precisely known when or under what circumstances the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri conceived the idea behind the writing of the Divine Comedy, though some speculate that the first lines were penned no earlier than 1308, and it was certainly after 1302, when he was exiled from Florence for political reasons. There is, apparently, a symbolic reference (“the Greyhound”) in the Divine Comedy to Cangrande I della Scala, ruler of Verona from 1308 to 1329, which supports the later date. The narrative of Inferno, the first of the three poems comprising the Divine Comedy, is set in 1300 when Dante was about thirty- five years old. This supposition is based on the opening line of Inferno, which reads: “Midway upon the journey of our life. . . .” The rationale is that Dante was referencing a biblical seventy- year life span, which gives him the narrative age of thirty- five. It is believed that Dante composed and edited Inferno, then Purgatorio, and finally Paradiso over the remaining years of his life, and that he finished Paradiso shortly before his death in 1321. The work is an allegorical journey through what Dante, a medieval Catholic, imagined to be the afterlife.