Dante Alighieri at a glance

Dante was exiled because of Florence's political feuds. After the Black Guelphs took control in 1301, he was sentenced in 1302 on charges related to his political activities and faced execution unless he paid a fine. He never returned home and wandered between cities, finishing his poem in Ravenna shortly before he died.

He wanted a wider audience. Latin was the language of scholars, but Dante wrote in the vernacular Italian of Tuscany, which ordinary readers understood. The choice helped establish the Tuscan dialect as the basis of standard Italian and made his poem one of the foundations of Italian literature.

Dante called the poem simply his Comedy, and the word Divine was added later. The writer Giovanni Boccaccio described it as divine, and by 1555, a Venice edition carried the word in its title. The label stuck because the poem is about the afterlife and is widely seen as a masterpiece.

Yes. Most of the souls Dante meets in the poem are real people, many of them his own neighbors and enemies from Florence. He also includes historical and mythological figures. Putting contemporaries in hell let him judge the politics and corruption of his day while telling a story about sin and salvation.