Dante Alighieri
1265–1321 3 entries
Biography
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, the author of the Divine Comedy and the father of the Italian language. He was born in Florence in 1265, and at nine he first saw Beatrice, the girl he loved all his life and celebrated in his early book of poems and prose, the New Life. He fought for his city in the battle of Campaldino in 1289 and went into politics, and in 1300 he served as one of the priors who governed Florence.
In 1302, when the rival faction took power, he was banished and sentenced to death should he ever return, and he never saw Florence again. In exile, moving from court to court, he wrote the Divine Comedy, the journey of a living man through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice. He wrote it not in Latin but in the Tuscan spoken by the people, and its hundred cantos did more than anything else to make that language the language of Italy. He died in Ravenna in 1321, where he is buried to this day.
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