For those who love all things Italian... 

The author of La Commedia (The Divine Comedy), considered a masterwork of world literature, (Durante degli Alighieri, better known as Dante, (c. June 1, 1265 - September 14, 1321) was an Italian and Florentine poet. His greatest work, the epic poem "The Divine Comedy", is considered the greatest literary statement produced in medieval Europe.

Dante is also called the "the Father of the Italian language". He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, but with some elements of Latin and other regional dialects. He deliberately aimed to reach a readership throughout Italy including laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history and scholarship in general but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience, setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio, Milton or Ariosto, Dante did not really become an author read all over Europe until the Romantic era. To the Romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who sets his own rules, creates persons of overpowering stature and depth and goes far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters and who, in turn, cannot really be imitated. Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified, and by the time of the 1865 jubilee, he had become solidly established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world.

Dante is sometimes considered to be the most important poet of the Renaissance. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that the Renaissance begins with Dante; he made the first steps out of the ancient world and into the modern world. Often ranked with Homer and Virgil as one of the great epic poets, Dante is certainly the most modern. While the epic poets of ancient times tended to celebrate the greatness and heroism of their respective nations (for Homer, Greece; for Virgil, Rome) Dante's objective in his epic is decidedly different: to explore Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and, in so doing, reconcile Europe's Hellenic past with its Christian present. Dante's epic has no epic battles, nor any towering heroes. Its protagonist is Dante himself, a plain and (by his own admission) somewhat reserved Florentine. Its action consists, primarily, of Dante's encounters and conversations with the dead. In so doing, Dante establishes a dialogue with the past in a way never before realized, and leads the way into a future that would become the Renaissance-literally, the rebirth-of European culture, a recapturing and "baptizing" of its Hellenic past.