Considering the limited information on how the Commedia took shape in Dante’s mind, it is impossible to identify with any certainty the forms of its genesis or to reconstruct in any detail the various phases of its conception. The extraordinary work on Beatrice announced at the end of the Vita nuova cannot really be taken as a precise antecedent of the Commedia, and neither is there any evidence to confirm the legend passed down by Boccaccio, namely, that the first seven cantos of the Inferno were composed in Florence before the poet’s exile. It does seem plausible, however, that the Commedia was written around 1307-8, and therefore at the same time as he stopped work on the De vulgari and Convivio. In the fourth treatise of the Convivio there are in fact four themes, developed at length in the Commedia: reflection on the need for and purpose of the Empire, denunciation of the greed that destroyed civic order, the idea of human life as a journey, a pilgrimage towards God.

It therefore seems likely that Dante began working on Inferno around 1307, with the definitive version being published after April 1314, the date of Pope Clement V’s death, as prophesized in Inf., XIX 78-87. A poetic allusion to the battle at Montecatini on 29 August 1315 in Purg., XXIII 109-11, together with Andrea Lancia’s evident borrowing (in 1316) of several lines from the second cantica for his abridged vernacular translation of the Aeneid, constitute the terminus ante quem of Dante’s Purgatorio. It seems clear that Dante worked on Paradiso right up to the last years of his life, since in his first Eclogue (1319-20) to Giovanni del Virgilio, he compares the third and incomplete cantica with the first two which had already been published. This third cantica thus circulated in its entirety only after Dante’s death.