The Inferno is the first third of Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, originally written in the Tuscan dialect of Italian. It was written in the early years of the 14th century. In a time when all serious literary works invariably were written in Latin, Dante deliberately chose his native language to present his epic, hence the word comedy describing a subject that is far from light entertainment.
The poem was published in Italy a full century before Gutenberg's press revolutionized the printing and publishing industry. Although there are no known copies in Dante's hand that have survived to the present day, there are several hundred in manuscript form, some dating back to a few years after Dante's death. The first known copy to appear in print dates from 1472, over one hundred and fifty after Dante first published the work.