Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) was a Florentine poet regarded as a father of the Italian literary language. His Divine Comedy, composed between roughly 1308 and 1321, comprises three canticles — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — and narrates a journey through the afterlife. Written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, it shaped the standard for literary Italian. His earlier La Vita Nuova (c. 1293) combines verse and prose addressed to Beatrice Portinari. Sentenced to exile from Florence in 1302, he never returned to the city and died in Ravenna in 1321.
