---
node: dante_alighieri
type: person
slug: dante_alighieri
title: "Dante Alighieri"
lead: "Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a Florentine poet, the author of the Divine Comedy, and is often called the father of the Italian language."
published: 2026-07-11
updated: 2026-08-27
change: "Rewrote the opening body section so that it no longer restates the page's own lead."
previous_hash: "bddd034e3fc66031c387d6beae98e765fe8599874e6141e17f1305c2f0f09f62"
requester: internal
reason: "The section repeated the lead, so the first thing under the first heading was text the reader had already read in the search result."
image_file: dante_alighieri.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_Portrait_of_Dante_-_WGA02802.jpg"
image_author: "Sandro Botticelli"
image_license: "Public domain"
---

## Who they were

He was born in Florence in 1265 into a family of the minor nobility, fought as a cavalryman at Campaldino at twenty-four, and rose to serve two months of 1300 as one of the city's six priors. That office cost him everything: in 1302 the faction that had seized Florence condemned him in his absence to a fine, and then to be burned alive if he ever came back. He spent his last nineteen years moving between the courts of northern Italy, died in Ravenna in 1321, and is buried there still — Florence has been asking for the bones, and being refused, ever since.

## What they did

Active in the turbulent politics of Florence, Dante was exiled in 1302 and never returned to the city. In exile he wrote the Divine Comedy, an epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise guided by Virgil and Beatrice, composed in the Tuscan vernacular rather than in Latin.

## Legacy

The poem helped make Tuscan the basis of standard Italian and stands as a cornerstone of world literature. Dante is a founding figure of the Italian literary tradition and a bridge from the medieval to the Renaissance world.