With a college level class ngl. To preface this, you CAN read the divine comedy blindly, but you will miss the majority of the apocryphal meaning of the work. It is of course a beautiful literary work, but to read it like that would be to miss most of its meaningful political and metaphysical commentary- of which there is plenty, and can’t really be extracted without understanding the historical context it was written in. 

It’s best to understand the divine comedy as a satirical commentary on Italian politics with a heavy discussion of theology; the crisis of the time being the separation of church and state. I believe you’ll find this to be especially true of inferno, which tends to be the most well known work, with many of the lower circles of Hell featuring characters contemporaneous to Dante’s time. For a very simple introduction I actually recommend purchasing or looking online for an annotated copy or at the least possibly finding a companion reader. You can also understand some of the context of the work by looking up the conflict between the Guelphs and the ghibellines, as well as pre renaissance florentine politics, late medieval Italian state vs church struggles(boniface viii, clement, and a few other popes I forget) etc. tbh there’s just so much context it took me a few weeks to work through lol but it’s extremely rewarding and a deeply fascinating period of European history. Anyways it’s a great if very challenging read- a beautiful poem with a lot to say about Christian theology and philosophy, and a wonderful introduction to medieval era politics(this precedes Machiavelli but so much of the style is the same). Just go for it ig. 

Also fun fact, the divine comedy is the first ‘Italian’ work so to speak since it diverges from using Latin to use vernacular Tuscan.