he was ever caught in Florence again.
Consequently, Dante never returned to his home city. This
exile also meant that Dante's fortunes, which were not as large
as his family had once held, were confiscated. He spent the
remainder of his life living at the expense and generosity of
friends. He died in Ravenna in 1321.
Dante's private life is less well defined than his public
affairs. He was betrothed to Gemma Donati in 1277 (remember he
would have been twelve then!) whom he later married. There were
three children: Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia. (Some of the
historians mention a fourth, Giovanni.) When Dante's sons were
fourteen, they also had to join their father in exile. Both
Jacopo and Pietro later wrote about the Divine Comedy. Antonia
entered a convent and took the name Sister Beatrice.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy while he was in exile. He
finished the first part, the Inferno, in 1314 and the final
cantos of the Paradiso in 1320. The title of the entire work is
The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by Citizenship, Not by
Morals.
Dante was a man who lived, who saw political and artistic
success, and who was in love. He was also a man who was
defeated, who felt the danger and humiliation of exile, and who
was no stranger to the cruelty and treachery possible in people.
Dante felt that he was the victim of a grave injustice. He also
suffered serious self-doubts--natural for a man in exile and
eternally dependent. Remembering all this about Dante, we can
see his work as the sum of all these experiences and his answers
to the basic human questions: What is man? Why does he act as
he does? What is Good and what is Evil? When it so often looks
like "Good guys finish last," why should anyone be good?
You are probably saying, "So what?" at this point. But
trying to understand a work of literature is often a lot like
trying to understand other people. You have to figure out where
they are coming from and what makes them tick. Dante comes from
a medieval Roman Catholic background, and that is extremely
important for the Divine Comedy.
What if a reader is not a Catholic or a Christian? What
about a 20th-century reader who doesn't know medieval history?
Can that person still understand the poem, or will the religious
and medieval aspects get in the way? Obviously, we can't
promise there will never be a problem, but the work has been
read all over the world for centuries.
After all, when you read science fiction, you accept that
