Volta
Person1265 – 1321

Dante Alighieri

Also called: Dante

Florentine poet who wrote the Divine Comedy in Tuscan rather than Latin, opening the way for Italian literature and the Renaissance

Born to a family of minor nobility in Florence, he idealised all his life Beatrice, whom he met at nine, and wrote the Vita Nuova in her honour. As a politician of the pro-papal Guelph party he served as one of Florence’s chief magistrates, but when the party split he was condemned to death by his opponents and banished. Besides the Comedy he wrote, in Latin, De vulgari eloquentia on the worth of the vernacular and De monarchia in defence of imperial power. He never returned home, dying at Ravenna, where he is buried.

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1 related event

  1. 1
    1308 – 1321Dante’s Divine Comedyauthor

    Exiled from Florence, the poet Dante wrote the Divine Comedy from about 1308 to 1321 in Tuscan rather than Latin, opening the way for Italian literature and the Renaissance.

Themes this person appears in

  • Late Medieval Europe and the Renaissance1077 – 1517

    From Canossa to the eve of the Reformation — papal power at its height and in decline, towns and parliaments, royal power growing through the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, and the Renaissance and printing