By Manlio Marano
Dante suddenly wakes up on the other side of the Acheron, and he descends with Virgil in the first circle of Inferno: the Limbo. Here he gets hit by the intense sighs that come from the souls of the children who died before being baptised, and all the women and men who lived before Christ. They did not refuse God. They simply could not get to know him. For this reason, their only punishment is the mere distance from God. Virgil, who shares his punishment with these souls, tells Dante of how Jesus Christ descended in the Limbo to take in Heaven the patriarchs of the Old Testament. While walking, Dante sees a light, and understands that this place is full of honourable people. So, Dante and Virgil are welcomed by the great poets Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, and he feels proud to be the sixth among those poets. They bring Dante into a castle surrounded by seven circles of walls and defended by a river. From a little hill they see the souls who live in that place. These are the Great Spirits, the great men of the classical age and not only. Among them Dante sees Julius Caesar, Aeneas, Cicero, Aristotle, Averroes, Saladin and others. These people unconsciously testified the presence of God with their actions. So Dante must recognize their greatness. They speak rarely and with gentle voices. Their serene detachment, their dignified composure, and their authoritative appearance, are the visual signs of their intellectual and moral superiority. After looking at these souls, Dante leaves those poets who had done him the honour of accepting him as the sixth between them. But Dante did not know, or maybe he did, that History would have recognized him as the First of the poets. In the end of the Canto, Dante and Virgil arrive to a place where darkness reigns supreme.