Dante Alighieri's epic poem of a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven — written in Italian in the early fourteenth century — which synthesized medieval Christian theology with classical learning, established the Italian vernacular as a literary language, and remains the most ambitious and technically accomplished work in the Western literary canon.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Italian when serious literature was written in Latin — a statement that the vernacular tongue of ordinary people was adequate for the highest literary and theological purposes. The poem has not been surpassed in formal ambition in seven hundred years. T.S. Eliot said Dante and Shakespeare divide the world of literature between them; there is no third.