Malebolge

Ten concentric ditches crossed by bridges like the spokes of a wheel, each with its own fraud and its own punishment. Not ten levels: ten districts of a single place you learn to move through. The game takes its name from here, and half of it happens here.

The name is the poem’s own: «Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge, / tutto di pietra di color ferrigno, / come la cerchia che dintorno il volge» (Inf. XVIII 1-3). The grammar is radial: the ditches are crossed on the bridges rather than walked along, and walking the length of one happens exactly once.

The bridges are not aligned, so the road is a spiral that makes more than a full turn, and between one bridge and the next you walk a narrow bank with the drop on both sides. No ditch is passed the way the one before it was: what gets you across comes out of the punishment inside it, and works nowhere else.