Florentine exile who mapped Hell in Tuscan verse
Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) wrote the Divine Comedy in vernacular Tuscan when Latin still ruled scholarship—terza rima, Beatrice, and Guelph exile shaping Western art. Boccaccio later called the Commedia divina; Florence rescinded his death sentence in 2008.
Nobody knows Dante's exact birthday, but he is thought to have been born in Florence around May 1265. The Inferno opens with the narrator halfway along life's road, which on the biblical span of seventy years makes him about 35 during an imagined journey set in 1300. His father Alighiero was a businessman and moneylender; his mother Bella, probably of the noble Abati family, died before he was ten. The family sided with the Guelphs, who backed the papacy, yet suffered no reprisals when the Ghibellines took Florence after Montaperti in 1260, most likely because Alighiero counted for too little to bother with.
Dante said he first saw Beatrice Portinari when he was nine and she eight, and fell for her on sight without a word passing between them. At twelve, though, he was pledged to Gemma Donati, who bore him Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia before his exile; he wrote sonnets to Beatrice but never once named his wife in verse. Around eighteen he joined Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and Brunetto Latini at the head of the sweet new style, a label Dante himself invented. When Beatrice died in 1290 he sought comfort in Latin books and then in philosophy at religious schools such as the Dominican one at Santa Maria Novella.
He rode with the Guelph cavalry at Campaldino on 11 June 1289, in the front rank of the charge. To take part in politics he enrolled in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries around 1295, and in 1300 he spent two months as prior, the city's highest office. The victorious Guelphs then split into Whites under Vieri dei Cerchi, Dante's faction, and Blacks under Corso Donati, who sided with the pope. While Boniface VIII held Dante back in Rome, Charles of Valois rode into Florence with the Blacks on 1 November 1301, and six days of killing and wrecking followed.
In March 1302 the new regime charged him with graft during his term as prior, fined him and banished him for two years. With his property seized and convinced of his innocence, he refused to pay, so the penalty hardened into permanent exile, with burning threatened should he return. He spent 1306–07 as a guest of Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana. His treatise De vulgari eloquentia defended writing in the spoken tongue, and his Tuscan verse helped shape standard Italian. Credited with the first terza rima, he died on 14 September 1321 and went on to inspire Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson.
Source: Dante Alighieri
