The Divine Comedy

In 1302, Dante Alighieri lost everything. He was a poet and politician in Florence, a rich and violently factional city, and he backed the losing side. While he was away on an embassy to Rome, his rivals condemned him for corruption. He never went home. A later sentence said that if he set foot in Florence again, he would be burned alive.

The Divine Comedy is the poem he wrote out of that homelessness. It is a long narrative poem in a hundred parts, in which a man named Dante travels through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, a Florentine woman he had loved from a distance since childhood and who died young. He began it around 1308 and worked on it for the rest of his life, moving between the courts of Verona and finally Ravenna, living on the hospitality of lords because an exile had no income of his own.

His boldest choice was linguistic. Serious writing in his day meant Latin, the language of the church and the universities. Dante wrote in the Tuscan speech of ordinary Florentines, because he wanted readers who were not scholars, and he invented a chiming three-line rhyme scheme (terza rima) to hold it together. That decision helped turn his dialect into the basis of modern Italian, which is why Italians still call their language the tongue of Dante.

He called it simply Comedìa, meaning a story that ends happily. The word Divina came later, from admirers, and stuck when a Venetian printer put it on the title page in 1555.

He finished the final section in Ravenna and died there in 1321, probably of malaria caught crossing the marshes. The poem spread fast in handwritten copies. By 1373 Florence, the city that had banished him, was paying Giovanni Boccaccio to lecture on it in public. Since then Botticelli, William Blake and Gustave Doré have drawn it, and its Hell has shaped how much of the West still pictures the afterlife.