The date of the action of the poem is in the jubilee
year 1300, when Dante was in his thirty-fifth year.
His journey began on Good Friday and continued for
a week, ending Thursday evening.

There exists no poetical work elaborated with such
consummate art as this. The smallest detail is worked
out; it resembles a technical work, every iron joint,
every nail of which has been considered before. Even
the number of the words seems to have been counted.
The mystical properties of numbers, on which such
stress is laid in the Vita Nuova, where the number
Nine, that of the miraculous, recurs ever and again,
and Beatrice herself is called a Nine, that is, a wonder
whose root is in the Trinity--these properties are
worked out to the utmost in the structure of the
Divine Comedy. The numbers Three, that of the
threefold Deity, Nine, that of wonder and second
birth, and Ten, the number of the Perfect, are the
basis of its construction. Three are the rhymes, three
verses form a stanza, three animals rise to terrify
Dante, three holy women intervene for him, three
guides lead him. Three in number are the realms,
and correspondingly the whole poem is divided into
three parts; the book opens with an introductory
canto, then follow ninety-nine cantos, thirty-three for
each of the three realms, corresponding to the years of
Christ's life on earth, so that the whole number of the
cantos is an hundred, the number of the Whole.
Each of the three realms is divided into ten regions:
Hell into Limbo and the nine circles; Purgatory into

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