Italy commemorates the 700th anniversary from the Poet’s death with a series of events and celebrations.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1256. A poet, philosopher and very much involved in politics, Dante is world-wide famous for his masterpiece, La Divina Commedia, The Divine Comedy, a journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, which he chose to write in his own vernacular language, the Tuscan dialect, rather than Latin.
For this reason, while the geographic area of Italy was still just a mosaic of small kingdoms and states, sometimes as little as a city, Dante became the Father of the Italian language and unified a nation under the Divine Comedy and its language, well before the political union that was achieved only much later in 1861.
Due to contrasts within his own political party he was exiled and died in Ravenna in 1321.