Dante the pilgrim

I was watching Peter Greenaway's TV Dante on Ubuweb yesterday, and it called to mind a moment from the fall of 1995, when I was a student at Anne Arundel Community College. I was enrolled in a course in World Literature (which to its credit was truly global in scope - we read bits of everything from Indian theater to Mayan creation myths, from Chinese poetry to Faust), and we were discussing Dante's Divine Comedy. My professor remarked, somewhat offhandedly, that the directness of Dante's narrative and the richness of his descriptive verse could only be the result of lived experience. This struck me as an odd thing to say, and so I asked him if he meant to say he believed that the poet had literally experienced the events related in the Inferno. "Yes," he said, "That's exactly what I mean. Dante lived this story, or at least he believed that he did. This stuff is for real."