Dante Alighieri

A poet of Florence, author of the Divine Comedy, whose choice to write in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin did more than any other single work to establish Italian as a literary language. Exiled from Florence in 1302 on politically motivated charges after the city's ruling faction turned against him, he never returned, and the Comedy, written in exile, is shot through with the political and personal grievances of that displacement, most visibly in the poem's placement of specific named Florentines in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise according to Dante's own judgment of them.