Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri, widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, which was accessible only to educated readers. His De vulgari eloquentia was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as The New Life and Divine Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language.