Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri, most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, was born in Florence around May 1265 and died on September 14, 1321. Known simply as Dante, he was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher whose life fell in a period when Northern Italian city states were split by factional politics and Latin still dominated scholarly and literary writing. His family belonged to the Guelph side, which supported the papacy against the Ghibellines, supporters of the Holy Roman Empire. That political world was not distant from him. Dante fought with the Guelph cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino on June 11, 1289, and later took part in Florentine public life after enrolling in the Physicians’ and Apothecaries’ Guild.

He is best known for the Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later named Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio. The poem’s vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven became one of the central works of the Middle Ages and is widely considered the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante’s use of the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme known as terza rima is attributed to him. His writing also gave later artists and writers a powerful set of images and ideas, and his influence reached figures such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, and Alfred Tennyson.

Dante’s choice of language was as bold as his subject. Many writers of his time used Latin for serious work, and many Italian poets drew from French or Provençal models. Dante wrote major works in the vernacular, especially his native Tuscan dialect. In De vulgari eloquentia, or On Eloquence in the Vernacular, he offered one of the first scholarly defenses of writing in the vernacular. Works such as The New Life, dated 1295, and the Divine Comedy helped establish the Florentine dialect as a basis for modern standard Italian. For this reason, he is often called the “father” of the Italian language, and in Italy he is known as il Sommo Poeta, “the Supreme Poet.”

Several forces shaped Dante’s mind and art. Little is known for certain about his education, but he likely studied at home or in a church or monastery school in Florence. He studied Tuscan poetry and admired the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli, whom he later called his “father” in Purgatorio. He encountered the poetry of the Sicilian School, Provençal troubadours such as Arnaut Daniel, and Latin writers of classical antiquity, including Cicero, Ovid, and especially Virgil. These influences met with his own intense interest in love, language, moral order, and civic life.

Beatrice Portinari also held a central place in Dante’s imagination. He said he first met her when he was nine and she was eight, and he later wrote sonnets to her, though he never knew her well. His experience of love for Beatrice helped shape his part in the dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style,” a term he himself coined. Dante’s words still carry because they join private feeling with public history, learned tradition with spoken language, and earthly conflict with a vast moral vision. He wrote from one city and one age, yet his reach helped define Italian literature itself.