Dante Alighieri, most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
Posthumous portrait in tempera by Sandro Botticelli, 1495
Dante's house museum in Florence. The house has been significantly altered since Dante’s time.
Alleged Dante portrait attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello palace, Florence. It was painted c. 1335 and has been restored.
Portrait of Dante, c. 1375–1406, from a fresco in the Palazzo dei Giudici, Florence
The Divine Comedy is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
Dante shown holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above, in Domenico di Michelino's 1465 fresco
Dante gazes at Mount Purgatory in an allegorical portrait by Agnolo Bronzino, painted c. 1530
Virgil
Beatrice