Dante Alighieri

• 1. Introduction

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  Dante Alighieri began his most famous poem with a line of plain confusion: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," or "Midway upon the journey of our life." He was writing about a man lost in a dark wood, around 35 years old, imagining a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. That phrase also became a clue. Scholars used it, alongside a passage in the Paradiso hinting he was born under the sign of Gemini, to fix his birth around May 1265. The exact date is unknown to this day. He was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher who would be called the father of the Italian language. Yet he spent his final two decades barred from his own city, condemned to perpetual exile and threatened with burning at the stake. How does a man banished from Florence end up the supreme poet of all Italy? And why did the language he chose to write in matter as much as the story he told?

• 2. A Language Reborn

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  Latin still ruled scholarly and literary writing in Dante's day, and many Italian poets looked instead to French or Provencal traditions. Dante broke with both. He chose the vernacular, his native Tuscan dialect, and made a serious case for it in De vulgari eloquentia, one of the first scholarly defenses of writing in the common tongue. By writing a lofty, serious poem in this language, he proved it was fit for formal works. The Florentine dialect he used in The New Life and the Divine Comedy helped shape the standardized Italian spoken today. His commentary on his own poems was also in the vernacular, both in the Vita Nuova and in the unfinished Convivio, where Latin was almost universally expected. Petrarch and Boccaccio would later follow the precedent he set. Together the three are called the tre corone, the "three crowns" of Italian literature, and Italy named Dante il Sommo Poeta, the Supreme Poet.

• 3. Beatrice And The New Style

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  Dante said he first met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, when he was nine and she was eight, and he claimed to have fallen in love at first sight without even speaking to her. At 12 he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, of the powerful Donati family. Years after that marriage, he claimed to meet Beatrice again and wrote her several sonnets, yet he never mentioned Gemma in any poem. When Beatrice died in 1290, he turned to Latin literature for refuge. His feelings for her followed the pattern of courtly love, a phenomenon developed in earlier French and Provencal poetry. His experience of it was typical, but his expression was unique. In her name he left his mark on the dolce stil nuovo, the "sweet new style," a term he coined himself. Around the age of 18 he met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, and Brunetto Latini, and together they became the leaders of that style. He gave Brunetto special mention in the Divine Comedy for what he had taught him.

• 4. Guilds And Guelphs

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  Most Northern Italian city states in Dante's time split into two factions: the Guelphs, who backed the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Empire. Dante's family was loyal to the Guelphs. On the 11th of June 1289 he fought with the Florentine Guelph cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino against the Ghibellines of Arezzo, where he was responsible for the first attack. That victory brought a reform of the Florentine constitution, which required anyone in public life to enroll in one of the city's guilds. Dante joined the Physicians' and Apothecaries' Guild around 1295, drawn perhaps by the link between philosophy and medicine, and because apothecaries also worked as booksellers. Membership let him hold public office in a city rife with unrest. After the Ghibellines were beaten, the Guelphs themselves divided into the White Guelphs led by Vieri dei Cerchi, Dante's party, and the Black Guelphs led by Corso Donati. The Blacks supported the Pope; the Whites wanted more freedom from Rome.

• 5. Condemned To Exile

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  Pope Boniface VIII planned a military occupation of Florence after the Whites took power and expelled the Blacks. In 1301 the council sent a delegation including Dante to Rome, hoping to persuade the Pope not to send Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip IV of France, into the city. Boniface dismissed the other delegates and asked Dante alone to remain. On the 1st of November 1301, Charles entered Florence with the Black Guelphs, who over the next six days destroyed much of the city and killed many enemies. In March 1302 Dante was condemned to two years of exile and ordered to pay a large fine, accused of corruption during his two months as city prior in 1300. He refused to pay, partly because he believed he was innocent and partly because the Blacks had seized all his Florentine assets. His sentence became perpetual exile, and a return without payment could have meant being burned at the stake. In June 2008, nearly seven centuries after his death, the city council of Florence passed a motion rescinding his sentence.

• 6. The Wandering Years

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  Lunigiana hosted Dante as a guest in 1306 and 1307, one stop in a long drift across Italy. He went to Verona under Bartolomeo I della Scala, then to Sarzana in Liguria, and is supposed to have lived in Lucca with a woman named Gentucca, whom he later thanked in the Purgatorio. He took part in several White Guelph attempts to regain power, but treachery sank them, and he grew so disgusted with the infighting that he vowed to become a party of one. In 1310, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg marched into Italy at the head of 5,000 troops. Dante saw in him a new Charlemagne who might restore the imperial office and retake Florence. He wrote to Henry and several Italian princes demanding they destroy the Black Guelphs, and during this time he wrote De Monarchia, arguing for a universal monarchy under Henry. Henry died of a fever in 1313, and with him died any hope Dante had of seeing Florence again. He returned to Verona, where Cangrande I della Scala gave him security and a fair degree of prosperity, and whom Dante admitted to his Paradise.

• 7. Building The Comedy

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  At some uncertain point during his exile, Dante conceived of the Comedy, a work far more assured and ambitious than anything he had written in Florence. He likely began it only after accepting that his political ambitions might be disrupted indefinitely. Beatrice returned to his imagination with renewed force, even though in the Convivio he had declared that youthful romance belonged to the past. Francesco da Barberino left an early hint the poem was underway, noting in his Documenti d'Amore, probably written in 1314 or early 1315, that Dante had followed the Aeneid in a poem called "Comedy" set in the underworld. The Inferno had been published by 1317, established by quoted lines in the margins of dated records from Bologna. The poem describes a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice. As Dante explained in a letter to Cangrande, the word comedy in its classical sense meant a work reflecting an ordered universe that ends in good. The pilgrimage begins in moral confusion and ends with the vision of God. Boccaccio would later christen the poem Divina.

• 8. Death And Afterlife

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  Ravenna gave Dante his final home, after its prince Guido II da Polenta invited him to stay in 1318. He died there on the 14th of September 1321, aged about 56, of quartan malaria caught while returning from a diplomatic mission to the Republic of Venice. He was attended by his three children, possibly by Gemma Donati, and by friends and admirers, then buried at the Church of San Pier Maggiore, later the Basilica di San Francesco. In 1329, Bertrand du Pouget, a cardinal and nephew of Pope John XXII, classified the Monarchia as heretical and sought to have Dante's bones burned, but allies interceded to prevent it. Florence came to regret his exile and repeatedly demanded his remains. The custodians in Ravenna refused, once hiding the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Florence built him a tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce in 1829, and it has stood empty ever since. Its front reads Onorate l'altissimo poeta, "Honor the most exalted poet," a line from the fourth canto of the Inferno. On the 30th of April 1921, six centuries after his death, Pope Benedict XV called him the "pride and glory of humanity," and Italy's first dreadnought battleship, completed in 1913, already bore his name.