Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri was the Florentine poet who wrote the Divine Comedy — the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — and in doing so gave Italian literature its first great monument and European imagination its most detailed map of the afterlife. Born in Florence around 1265, he was active in Florentine politics until a change of regime exiled him in 1302; he never returned. The Comedy was written in exile and completed shortly before his death in Ravenna in 1321. It is both a theological argument and a personal document: its narrator travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven guided first by Virgil and then by Beatrice — the woman Dante loved from a distance his entire life. A mighty flame evolves from a tiny spark: the aphorism captures the work's essential movement, from the dark wood of the opening to the final vision of the light that moves the sun and all the other stars.