Dante+Alighieri

"//Dante & Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third..." -T.S Elliot//




 * Early Life**

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in what we believe to be around the year 1265. It is also speculated he was born under the sign of the Gemini, as referenced by a line in //La Divina Commedia "//Midway in our life's journey"//.// The details of his childhood are largely unknown, down to the exact date of his birth. What we do know thus far is largely attributed to the work of Dante's earliest biographer, Giovanni Boccaccio in his biography of the poet, //Vita Di Dante.//

The important events surrounding the publishing of //La Divina Commedia// begin with Dante's life as it meshes with that of the then Florentine society. Dante was a member of a Noble family known as the Guelphs, who supported the Pope of the Catholic Church. Their enemies, at least in the political sense were a rival family known as the Ghibellines, who supported the German Emperor, who claimed power in Italy. Dante was born roughly a year after the Ghibellines were successfully ousted from the Florentine political arena. Thus, Dante enjoyed growing up in a family that was well cemented in both power and comfort.

Dante began his political life in the year 1295, and was a part of several events that would lead to his exile from Florence. To begin, however strong the Guelphs were did not make them immune to infighting among themselves, quite the contrary. The Guelphs split into two separate factions known as the Whites & Blacks. Dante was a member of the Whites, and while he was acting as a delegate to the Pope on the day of November 1, 1301, the Blacks staged a successful coup under Charles De Valois.

This was a bad situation for Dante, as he was charged with the crimes of graft (Legal term used to define corruption by use of ones power for personal gain) and hostility against the Pope. He was exiled, and ordered never to return to Florence and if he did, his life would be forfeit. It is a sad twist of the poets life that he would never see his home again, living for the remainder of his life financially on the kindness of friends until his death in Ravenna in 1321.

Dante was twelve when he was betrothed to a woman named Gemma Donati, whom he later marries. This union would produce four children: Jacapo, Pietro, Antonia and some scholars mention a fourth child, Giovanni. Both of his sons would go on to write some of their own on the subject of their fathers most famous work with The Divine Comedy, and Antonia entered a Nunnery under the name of Sister Beatrice.

We can see see just from these snippets of the poets life how ripe with turmoil and strife it was. Dante Alighieri was a man who truly understood what it meant to be on the unforgiving side of political intrigue and subterfuge, notions that would aid him in shaping what would be the foremost text of classical Italian literature, The Divine Comedy.

Dante would finish part I of The Divine Comedy, The Inferno in the year 1314, denoting twelve years would have passed since his exile from Florence. He finished the last few Cantos of Paradisio in 1320, a year before his death. The title in totality is //The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by Citizenship, Not By Morals.// Knowing what we know of Dante's life and struggles will help us in understanding that the underlying theme of //The Inferno// is not so much all about fire & brimstone of Hell, but rather the Hell of man's dirty game of politics and the potential wickedness and purity of the human soul.