Readers have tried to map Dante's Divine Comedy for centuries. The Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti calculated that Hell was about 3,246 miles wide and 408 miles deep, and his woodcuts appeared in a landmark 1506 edition. In 1588 Galileo, then young, estimated Lucifer's height at about 1,200 metres and his arm at about 340 metres, and compared the vaulted ceiling of Hell to the dome of Brunelleschi. The later nineteenth-century maps of Michelangelo Caetani drew the Inferno as a cutaway of geological-looking circles, Purgatory as a terraced mountain, and Paradise as nine spheres around a funnel-shaped rose. Each plate turns the poem's structure into a single visible design.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.