The Florentine poet (1265–1321) who, banished from his city for life under threat of being burned alive if he returned, wrote one of the greatest poems of the European Middle Ages in a highly crafted Tuscan vernacular rather than the Latin of the learned. In choosing the vernacular for the highest subject matter, and in making that poem the cornerstone of a literary tradition, he did more than any other early writer to make Tuscan the model for literary Italian, and he is held by tradition to be the father of the Italian language and one of the supreme poets of the Western canon.
A man condemned to be burned alive if he ever set foot in his own city sat down, somewhere in exile, and wrote the most ambitious poem of the Middle Ages. He could have written it in Latin, the language of scholars, the Church, and serious literature. Instead Dante wrote it in a highly crafted Tuscan vernacular, rooted in Florentine speech, and argued that this living language could carry the highest thought a human mind could reach. The gamble worked beyond any reasonable hope. His poem became the foundation of Italian literature, and the dialect he wrote it in became, in large part, the basis of the standard Italian spoken today. The exile who lost his city built instead a universe out of his own language.