Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri was the poet of the Divina Commedia, whose Tuscan became the foundation of literary Italian. Born in Florence in 1265, he wrote the Vita nuova for Beatrice and served as one of the city's priors in 1300. Sentenced in his absence in 1302, he never returned, and he finished the Paradiso at Ravenna, where he died in 1321. Paolo and Francesca, from the fifth canto of the Inferno, have been set by more than twenty composers, Mercadante, Thomas, Rachmaninov and Zandonai among them, and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi grew from a few lines of canto XXX.