Dante e la Divina Commedia

In the 1302, Dante Alighieri was condemned to exile from Florence for political reasons political. He would never to it return never returned. It was precisely during those years of solitude and pain that he composed the his masterpiece.

The Comedy — the adjective "Divine" was added only in the sixteenth century — is divided into three canticles: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Dante in it recounts an imaginary journey imaginary through the afterlife, guided first by the poet Latin Virgil and then by Beatrice, his lost love lost.

The importance linguistic of the work is hard to overstate. Dante chose to write not in Latin, the language of the learned, but in the vernacular Florentine, contributing thus to lay the foundations of the Italian modern language.

Still today, seven centuries later, verses like "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" are immediately recognisable to every Italian. The Comedy remains one mirror in which which humanity continues to recognise itself.