The story is an allegory representing the soul's journey from spiritual depths to spiritual heights. As mankind exposes itself, by its merits or demerits, to the rewards or the punishments of justice, it experiences "Inferno" or hell, "Purgatorio" or purgatory, and "Paradiso" or heaven, a vision of a world of beauty, light, and song.
In this translation by John Aitken Carlyle, Thomas Okey, and Philip H. Wicksteed, a single listening will reveal the power of Dante's imagination to do the spiritual visible.