Ep. 15. Dante Alighieri: Party of One

Inviolable Voices: Stories of Writers and Literature

Dante Alighieri wrote one of the greatest literary works of all time: The Divine Comedy, of which the first section, the Inferno, is likely the greatest part. This episode tells the story of how he got there - a few years before he started the Comedy, he was one of the most important politicians in his beloved Florence. Dante might have continued along those lines and never written this work, but he had the misfortune of being born during a particularly troubled period of the Middle Ages, when Florence was riven by conflict and the papacy reached something of a crisis point. Less than ten years after he entered politics, he was exiled from the city he loved, never to see it again. But this tragedy gave Dante the anger and indignation he needed to write down his stunning vision of the afterlife: and the world its inhabitants had formerly occupied.