Dante Alighieri

DANTE ALIGHIERI (Florence, 1265- Ravenna, 1321).
"The Inferno.
Translator: Angelo Fiorentino.
Printer: L. Hachette et C, Paris, 1865.
With engravings by Gustave Doré (Strasbourg, 1832-Paris, 1883).
Presents faults.
Measurements: 44 x 34 x 5.5 cm.
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. He is known for his work the Divine Comedy, originally called Comedy and later baptized as Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular language in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, accessible only to educated readers. His work De vulgari eloquentia (On eloquence in the vernacular) was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect in works such as The New Life (1295) and The Divine Comedy helped establish the standardized modern Italian language. By writing his poems in the Italian vernacular rather than in Latin, Dante influenced the course of literary development, making Italian the literary language of Western Europe for several centuries. His work set a precedent that would later be followed by important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio.