Dante Alighieri

Dante trained in Florentine politics and rose to one of the city's governing priors, but backed the losing faction in a bitter feud and was exiled in 1302 on trumped-up corruption charges, on pain of being burned alive if he returned. He never saw Florence again.

He spent his last two decades moving between the courts of northern Italy, composing The Divine Comedy in vernacular Italian rather than scholarly Latin: a deliberate gamble that made the poem, and Tuscan Italian itself, foundational to the language's literary future. Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory as a figure of reason; Beatrice, the Florentine woman he'd loved chastely and lost young, leads him through Paradise as a figure of grace.

He died in Ravenna in 1321, months after finishing the poem, still formally an exile from the city that later petitioned, in vain, for the return of his bones.