The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 21

Inferno Canto I:61-99 Dante meets Virgil
While I was returning to the depths, one appeared, in front of my eyes, who
seemed hoarse from long silence. When I saw him, in the great emptiness, I
cried out to him ‘Have pity on me, whoever you are, whether a man, in
truth, or a shadow!’ He answered me: ‘Not a man: but a man I once was,
and my parents were Lombards, and both of them, by their native place,
Mantuans.