Dante Alighieri
Dante was exiled from Florence under sentence of death and wrote the poem that made Italian a literary language. He was born about 1265 into a family of the lesser nobility, fought as a cavalryman at Campaldino in 1289, and entered politics in a city where the Guelf party had split into White and Black factions over how far to accept papal authority. He was one of the six priors of Florence for two months in 1300 and was in Rome on an embassy to Boniface VIII in 1301 when the Blacks took the city with French help. He was condemned in absentia for corruption and barratry, fined, and told that if he returned he would be burned alive. He never went back. The Comedy was written over the following two decades in Verona and Ravenna, in a Tuscan vernacular he chose deliberately over Latin, and it is a hundred cantos of terza rima describing a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise, guided first by Virgil and then by Beatrice, a woman he had seen twice and who had died at twenty-four. It is also a settling of scores. Popes, Florentine politicians and personal enemies are placed with precision, and Boniface has a hole reserved for him among the simoniacs. He died at Ravenna in 1321, and Florence has been asking for the bones since 1519. The city condemned him twice, tried to get the remains back in 1519 and found the tomb empty because the friars had hidden them, and finally sent a lamp of Florentine oil to burn at the grave in Ravenna, which is still lit annually. The offer of a pardon in 2008 was declined by his descendants.
- Lived: 1265 CE – 1321 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: writer, philosopher
