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Dante Alighieri
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Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a Florentine poet, politician and exile. He was expelled from Florence in 1302 by the faction that took the city, under a sentence of death by fire if he returned, and he wrote the Commedia over the next twenty years in the towns that took him in, never going home. He wrote it in Tuscan rather than in Latin, which is a large part of the reason modern Italian is Tuscan. Beatrice, the woman who leads him through Paradise, was a real Florentine he saw perhaps twice and who died at twenty-four. He is buried in Ravenna, which has declined to give him back.