The greatest Italian poet and one of the most important writers of European literature. Dante is best known for the epic poem Commedia, c. 1310-14, later named La Divina Commedia. It has profoundly affected not only the religious imagination but all subsequent allegorical creation of imaginary worlds in literature. Dante spent much of his life travelling from one city to another. This had perhaps more to do with the restless times than his wandering character or fixation on the Odyssey. However, his Commedia can also be called a spiritual travel book.
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.
Dante received a thorough education in both classical and Christian literature. At the age of 12 he was promised to his future wife, Gemma Donati. Dante had already fallen in love with another girl whom he called Beatrice. She was 9 years old. Years later Dante met Beatrice again. He had become interested in writing verse, and although he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice, he never mentioned his wife Gemma in any of his poems. The work, La Vita Nuova (1292), celebrated Dante’s love for Beatrice.
Dante married in 1285 Gemma Donati but his ideal lady and inspiration for his poetry was Beatrice Portinari. Beatrice died in June 1290, at the age of 24. After Beatrice’s death, Dante withdrew into intense study and began composing poems dedicated to her memory.
In 1289 in the Florentine army Dante participated in a battle against the Arentines. He also entered politics and joined the White Guelphs, one of the rival factions within the Guelph party. In 1295 he entered the Guild of member Apothecaries, to which philosophers could belong, and which opened for him the doors to public office. Dante served the commune in various councils and was ambassador to San Gimignano in 1300 and then to Rome. In June 1300 he was elected a prior, and the following year he was appointed superintendent of roads and road repair.
After 1302 Dante never saw his home town again, but found shelter in various Italian cities and with such rulers as Ordelaffi of Forli, the Scaligeri of Verona, and the Malaspina of Lunigiana. Dante lived his remaining years in the courts of the northern Italy princes. During his exile, he started to write his Commedia, a long story-poem through the three worlds of the afterlife, under the patronage of the Ghibelline leaders. About 1320 Dante made his final home in Ravenna, where he died on the night of September 13-14, 1321. His body was brought to the church of San Francisco. Shortly after he died, Dante was accused of Averroism and his book, De Monarchia, was burned by the order of Pope John XXII. Franciscan monks hid Dante’s remains, when Pope Leo X decided in 1519 to deliver them in Florence to Michelangelo, who planned to construct a glorious tomb. Again in 1677 Dante’s remains were moved, and in 1865 construction workers rediscovered them accidentally.
Dante’s years of exile 1301- 1321 were productive. He wrote De Vulgari Eloquentia (1304-07), a treatise on his native language. In it he urged that the courtly Italian, used for amatory lyrics, be enriched with the best from every spoken dialect and established as a serious literary language. Thus the created language would be a way to unify the separated Italian territories. This treatise was one of the first medieval investigations of political philosophy, bringing forth the idea for a world government. Il Convivio was a collection of verse written between 1306 and 1308, Quaestio De Aqua Et Terra a scholastic treatise on physics. Thirteen Latin Epistles included both personal and political letters.
La divina commedia was completed just before the poet’s death. He probably started to write it in 1307. The Purgatorio was written in Verona, where he stayed more or less continuously from late 1312 to mid-1318. In Ravenna he wrote the final phases of the Paradiso. By the time the first two parts of the Comedy had been sent in circulation, Dante was being acclaimed through much of Tuscany as its greatest poet. Dante’s idea was to make the world of his poem a mirror of the world of the Christian God of his era.
Commedia’s most popular translation into English was made by Henry Cary (1772-1884), who issued The Inferno first, and later the complete work. A separate translation of The Inferno by Warwick Chipman (1961) is considered closer to the style and approach of Dante. Gustave Dore’s (1832-1883) illustrated text of Inferno (1861) is among the most famous editions.
