Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher, most likely born around May 1265 in Florence and dying on the 14th of September 1321 in Ravenna. He is known mononymously as Dante and called the father of the Italian language. In Italy he is referred to as il Sommo Poeta, the Supreme Poet.
The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice. The poem begins in moral confusion and ends with the vision of God. It was originally called Comedia and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio.
Dante was a White Guelph who was condemned to exile in March 1302 after the Black Guelphs, backed by Pope Boniface VIII and Charles of Valois, took control of Florence. He was accused of corruption during his two months as city prior in 1300 and ordered to pay a large fine. When he refused to pay, his sentence became perpetual exile.
Dante chose to write in the vernacular, his native Tuscan dialect, at a time when Latin dominated scholarly and literary writing. He defended this choice in De vulgari eloquentia, one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect helped establish the standardized modern Italian language.
Beatrice Portinari was the daughter of Folco Portinari, and Dante said he first met her when he was nine and she was eight, falling in love at first sight. He wrote her several sonnets and made her the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Divine Comedy. She died in 1290, after which Dante turned to Latin literature.
Dante died in Ravenna on the 14th of September 1321, aged about 56, of quartan malaria contracted while returning from a diplomatic mission to the Republic of Venice. He was buried at the Church of San Pier Maggiore, later the Basilica di San Francesco. Florence built him an empty tomb in 1829, but his body remains in Ravenna.