Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. At nine he first saw the girl Beatrice, and loved her all his life; after her early death at twenty-four she became the eternal guide of his poetry. He threw himself into Florentine politics and in 1300 was elected one of the city's six priors, but his party was defeated and in 1302 he was sentenced to perpetual exile, to be burned alive if he returned. For almost twenty years he wandered from city to city in Italy, and in exile he wrote the Divine Comedy; he died at Ravenna in 1321. Writing in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, he laid the foundations of the Italian language and is honoured as its father.