Authors

Italian · 1265–1321

Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri is the supreme Italian poet and one of the great figures in world literature, whose Divina Commedia — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — is the most ambitious literary work of the medieval period. Born in Florence, he was a politician as well as a poet, and his exile from Florence in 1302 (under threat of death if he returned) was the defining event of his later life. He wrote the Commedia largely in exile, completing it shortly before his death in Ravenna. The poem's influence on Western thought, theology, and literature is incalculable; T.S. Eliot called Dante and Shakespeare the only two poets who have fully divided the modern world between them.