Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri was a Florentine poet and politician exiled from his city in 1302, after which he wandered the courts of Italy and never returned. In exile he wrote the Divine Comedy, a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise guided first by Virgil and then by Beatrice, the woman he had loved from a distance since boyhood and whose death he had mourned in the New Life. The poem is at once a theology, a settling of political scores and the founding work of Italian literature. On Monarchy argues for the universal empire he hoped would end Italy’s wars.