Dante Alighieri

1265–1321 · Italian (Florence) · Late Medieval / Early Renaissance

Known for: Author of The Divine Comedy, the supreme masterpiece of medieval literature

Dante Alighieri was a Florentine politician, poet, and philosopher whose Divine Comedy—comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—is the most ambitious poem in Western literature. Exiled from his beloved Florence in 1302 for his political activities, he never returned, wandering from court to court across Italy for the rest of his life.

His entire literary career was shaped by his exile and by his idealized love for Beatrice Portinari, whom he met at age nine and loved until her death at 25, though they rarely spoke. He wrote the Comedy in Italian vernacular rather than Latin—a revolutionary decision that helped create the Italian language. He placed his personal enemies in Hell with savage satisfaction.

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