Author of the Divine Comedy, father of the Italian language
The greatest poet of the Middle Ages. Exiled from his native Florence by political strife, he wrote in his wandering the Divine Comedy — an imagined journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He made a bold choice: not the scholarly Latin of the day, but the Florentine dialect, and almost single-handedly raised this "vernacular" into a literary language, laying the foundation of modern Italian. He brought Virgil in as his guide through Hell, letting the classical and Christian worlds meet in verse.
In the Inferno, the gate of Hell bears a line quoted ever since: "Abandon all hope, you who enter here." Dante turned the abstract idea of sin and punishment into layer upon layer of concrete, sensible scenes, making "Hell" pass from a theological concept into a picture anyone could imagine — shaping the entire later Western imagination of the afterlife.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.