Dante began in a dark wood at midlife, traveled through Hell and Purgatory, and arrived in Paradise, guided by Virgil and then by Beatrice. The poem took him perhaps twenty years to write; he completed it just before his death in exile from the Florence that had condemned him. It contains everything: theology, politics, astronomy, gossip, vengeance, and love that moves the sun and other stars. Every canto is a world. Generations of readers have found their lives illuminated by this poem. It is the summit of medieval literature and the foundation of modern Italian.