After a decade of peripatetic exile, traversing "almost all of Italy", Dante died in Ravenna, soon after completing the Divina Commedia, the magnum opus which immediately elevated him above all his contemporaries. It was the first "modern classic", the first vernacular work to belong to a "canon" of European literature. At the beginning of the Inferno, his journey into the depths of Hell, Dante is introduced by his guide, Virgil, to the shades of Homer, Ovid, Lucan and Horace, who accept the newcomer as their peer. Immodest? Possibly, but without this unshakeable self-confidence, Dante could never have demonstrated that Italian — and, by extension, other vernacular tongues — were just as capable of linguistic excellence as Latin and Greek. Thus Dante opened the door, not only for his countrymen to create a self-consciously literary culture, but for Shakespeare to occupy the same role in English literature. 

Yet Dante's status as the man who ennobled the Italian language obscured his even greater achievement, as the man who ennobled humanity itself. His vision of cosmic justice was overtaken by the eroticism of Boccaccio, who was given a chair to comment on the Divine Comedy. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, he was little read. Rediscovered by the Romantics, who shared his sense of the sublime, if not his theology, Dante became the darling of the Victorians. 

What made him popular even, or especially, among the newly educated classes, were the illustrations of Gustave Doré. Big and bold, dark and dramatic, these steel engravings impressed themselves on the Anglo-Saxon imagination more vividly than the orotund accompanying translation by the Revd Francis Cary. Such images of grand guignol as "Mahomet mangled" in the ninth circle of Hell, reserved for schismatics, were the Victorian equivalent of the film of the book. Anticipating the gothic horror of Hollywood is Doré's evocation of a celebrated passage where the heretic Farinata rises from his fiery tomb to warn Dante that he will be exiled from Florence. It could be Boris Karloff.

Is Dante underrated today? His memory has been kept alive by poets, among them T.S. Eliot, scholars such as Ernst Robert Curtius or Erich Auerbach, and most recently a biography by A.N. Wilson. The secular world may have fought shy of Dante's devout, if idiosyncratic, Christianity, but those who don't read his Inferno are missing out on a great book. After eight centuries his laurels are secure, but his spirit knows no rest. What advice would his shade give to the reader of Brown's Inferno? "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."