Week2:Dante Alighieri--the writer of Divine Comedy

 The Divine Comedy is an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature.



Out of my curiosity,i took some rough research of this great Italian poet.


Dante was born in Florence,Italy.The exactly date he born was remained unknown.

When Dante was 12, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of  member of a powerful Donati family. Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. But by this time Dante had fallen in love with another, Beatrice Portinari, whom he first met when he was only nine. Years after his marriage to Gemma he claims to have met Beatrice again; he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice but never mentioned Gemma in any of his poems.
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Beatrice and Dante--The love story

In this epic poem(Divine Comedy), Beatrice talks to Dante, the author and a character himself, for the first time in Canto 2 of Inferno: she descends into Limbo and prays that the poet Virgil can rescue Dante. She then reappears in Canto 30 of Purgatory, when Virgil disappears.
Finally, Beatrice accompanies Dante in Paradise to the point closest to God that he is allowed to reach.

Their last meeting is set among the blessed in Heaven at the end of their afterworld journey.

Tradition says that Dante and Beatrice were also neighbors outside the walls of Florence—near the hill of Fiesole, where the Portinari and Alighieri families had two neighboring summer villas. It is plausible that Dante and Beatrice met each other as children there.

In his Vita Nova, Dante says he saw Beatrice for the first time when they were children: he was nine years old and she was eight.

He never forgot her after this meeting.


He meets her again after nine years in an unexpected way: Beatrice was walking with two women on Lungarno (one of the Florence streets along the Arno River).Dante remembered the episode well, but he ran away without saying a word.
Today, we know that Dante’s love for Beatrice was real. She represented the ideal of beauty and grace but was also a real woman.

Beatrice died at the age twenty-four. Dante was devastated and took refuge in poetry. He was not able to find peace, however, until he decided to start writing The Divine Comedy.

What did i learn from this article?

Maybe Dante wrote one of the world's greatest masterpiece just in order to obtaining his spiritual console for his beloved,however,this epic poem now possesses much more meaning in the field of Western Literature than an ordinary love poem.