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Dante Alighieri
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Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/June 13 1265 - September 13/14, 1321), was an Italian poet from Florence. His central work, the Commedia (Divine Comedy), is considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. In Italian he is known as "the Supreme Poet" ([I]l Sommo Poeta). Dante and the Divine Comedy have been a source of inspiration for artists for almost seven centuries. Dante, with Petrarch and Boccaccio are ... known as "the three fountains". Dante is also called the "the Father of the Italian language". The first biography written on him was by his contemporary Giovanni Villani. The most famous section in La Divina Commedia is the first third of it, the first 34 cantos of the poem, called Inferno, which is Dante's vision of hell.
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Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was the leading poet of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He was ... a prominent thinker in the fields of literary theory, moral and social philosophy, and political thought. His most famous work, The Divine Comedy, is a literary landmark and a synthesis of his political, religious, and social views. Dante's embrace of human individuality and happiness and his use of Italian rather than Latin in The Divine Comedy are often considered to signal the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of Renaissance humanism. Dante was born to a noble Florentine family who belonged to the White Guelf party and were allied with the papacy. His involvement with the chaotic politics of the time, however, convinced Dante of the necessity for political unity and the separation of church and state.
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Dante Alighieri, called Dante, wrote the poetic masterpiece La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy, which helped establish his native Tuscan dialect as the literary language of Italy. He is not only Italy's preeminent poet but, along with Shakespeare, one of the towering figures of Western literature. This primacy is accorded him because of his profound understanding of medieval thought, his mastery of complex technical skills, and the dramatic range and originality of his imagination. Dante's life spanned the troubled years of the late Middle Ages, in which the long struggle between pope and emperor for supremacy in Italy reached its most acute phase, and in which the concept of nationalism, exemplified by the growing power of the French monarchy, was displacing the medieval vision of a united Christendom. Deeply involved in the issues and events of his day, Dante reflected in his writings the aspirations and anxieties of his contemporaries, while projecting into them a universal and timeless dimension.
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The poet Dante Alighieri, who wrote the famous Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) during the medieval times, may have lived in this house in Florence. Dante's House is a small museum dedicated to Dante's work laid out in a historical progression of the poet's life.
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Dante Alighieri was born in May or June 1265 in Florence, Italy. By the age of nine, Dante met the girl who would become the focus of his creativity for the rest of his life. At that age, Dante first encountered Beatrice Portinari, who remained his Muse even after her death in 1290. His parents were of low aristocracy and a member of the Guelf political party. Since the early thirteenth century, the political parties of the Guelfi and the Ghibellini competed for control of Florence. The Guelfi favored the Pope as the leader of Italy, while the Ghibellini favored the emperor.
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Dante Alighieri was born into a Florentine family of noble ancestry. Little is known about Dante's childhood. His mother, Bella degli Abati, died when he was seven years old. His father, Alighiero II, made his living by money-lending and renting of property. After the death of his wife he remarried, but died in the early 1280s, before the future poet reached manhood. Brunetto Latini, a man of letters and a politician, became a father figure for Dante, but later in his Commedia Dante placed Latini in Hell, into the seventh circle, among those who were guilty of "violence against nature" - sodomy.
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Dante Alighieri