The opening of Dante’s Inferno reads: ‘Nel mezzo del cammino di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la diritta via era smarrita.’ — which could be poetically rendered in English as: “When I had traversed midway on this life’s trail, I woke to myself alone within a shadowed wilderness, for I had lost the right and proper path that never strays.”





