Dante Alighieri: The Poet Who Sent Florence to Hell

Florence exiled its most famous son and sentenced him to burn if he ever came back. He answered by writing florentines into Hell, by name, in the poem that would define the Italian language forever.

Dante Alighieri lost the city he loved in a coup dressed up as justice, and spent the next twenty years a wandering exile with nowhere to call home. Before any of that, he was a young cavalryman who nearly died fighting for the same city that would later condemn him. He wrote a woman he barely knew into one of literature's most enduring symbols, and centuries after his death, Florence built him a tomb with nobody in it: his bones never came home.

This is the story of a man who understood his city better than it ever understood him, and loved it anyway, in the only language he had left: verse sharp enough to outlast the people who wronged him.

-

Florence: The City That Changed the World is a series about the city that invented the Renaissance, financed Europe, and left a legacy still present in everything you see, think, and use every day.

If you want access to exclusive episodes, subscribe to Aedo Patrons on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening, and until next time.