Dante Alighieri(1265-1321)

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 into the lower nobility of Florence, to Alighiero di Bellincione d'Alighiero, a moneylender. A precocious student, Dante's education focused on rhetoric and grammar. He also became enamored with a young girl, Beatrice Portinari, whose death in 1290 threw a grieving Dante into intense religious studies. Though the Alighieri family had managed to avoid entanglement in the power struggles between the Ghibelline and Guelf families for control of Florence, Dante allied himself with the democratic Guelfs and married a member of that clan, Gemma di Manetto Donati, in 1285.

After serving in the Guelf forces as a cavalryman in the Battle of Campaldino, Dante enrolled in the Guild of Doctors and Pharmacists and became politically active. He became an ambassador and a prior, but after finding himself on the opposite side of the political party in power he was forced to flee Florence in 1301, never able to return to the city of his birth. He narrowly escaped being executed for treason.

Dante left for Verona and Ravenna, where he was joined by his children. He then wrote his most famous work, "Commedia", not in scholarly Latin but in the vernacular Italian of the time, giving his countrymen a literature of their own. In it he would resurrect the love of his youth, Beatrice, giving her a place among the angels. This work would also take the author, escorted by the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, on a grand tour to Hell and Purgatory, and later by his beloved Beatrice to Paradise. History would later judge Dante's creation to be divine. Dante Alighieri died in 1321 and was buried in Ravenna. Three sons--Pietro, Jacopo and Giovanni--and a daughter, Antonia, survived him.