Dante begins the Divine Comedy in exile

1307

Wandering the courts of Verona and Ravenna, Dante Alighieri set out to write a hundred-canto poem describing a pilgrimage through hell, purgatory, and heaven, in Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin. It would rescue Italian as a literary language, map the medieval cosmos in terza rima, and scorch Dante's personal enemies for all eternity in rhyming tercets.