Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was an Italian poet whose narrative poem the "Divine Comedy," describing an imagined journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, is regarded as one of the greatest works of world literature and the founding masterpiece of Italian-language literature. Exiled from his native Florence in 1302 amid the city's factional political conflicts, a sentence of death he never escaped, he wrote the "Divine Comedy" during his years of exile, populating its afterlife with historical and contemporary figures, including several of his own political enemies. His decision to write in Tuscan vernacular Italian rather than Latin helped establish Tuscan as the basis of standard modern Italian and demonstrated that a vernacular language could carry the highest literary ambitions. Dante died in Ravenna in 1321, having never returned to Florence.