Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321) was a Florentine poet, a man of the early Renaissance, yet his greatest work La Divina Commedia--The Divine Comedy--is a culminating statement of the medieval world view. It describes the poet's journey through Hell (/Inferno), Purgatory (/Purgatorio), and Paradise (/Paradiso), guided by the Roman epic poet Virgil.

The vision of Hell, the /Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, while the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand.

The Comedy was written in Dante's regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, Dante established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. He simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian.

Dante was born into a prominent Florentine family with loyalties to the Guelfs, a political alliance involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines. He fought against foreign troops allied with the Ghibellines in 1289. He became one of the ruling council of the city and took views that more closely resembled the Ghibellines'. But while serving in Rome as a papal envoy in 1302, he was declared a criminal by "Black Guelph" faction that had come to power in Florence.

He lived in exile for many years. As his prominence in Italian life grew, he was offered the chance to return to the city he loved, on condition of paying a fine. He refused--and, indeed, at his death refused to be buried there.

Other works include /De Vulgari Eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), on vernacular literature, and the /Vita Nuova ("New Life"), the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The book contains love poems in Tuscan, not a new thing; the vernacular had been used for lyric works before. But it also contains Dante's learned comments on his own prosody and these too are in the vernacular, quite a new thing indeed.