Dante Alighieri

“Dante's little book of memory: how he first saw Beatrice when they were both nine years old, how her greeting filled him with bliss and her refusal of it with despair, how he learned to write only in her praise — and how, after her death, he resolved to say of her what had never been said of any woman.”

“Dante's unfinished Latin treatise 'On Eloquence in the Vernacular': where human language came from, why it split into many tongues at Babel, how the dialects of Italy differ — and how an Italian poet might find, among them all, a single noble language fit for the highest poetry.”

“Exiled from Florence, Dante lays a 'banquet' of knowledge for those who hunger for it but have no Latin: three of his own love poems, served with long commentaries in Italian that reveal the lady they praise as Philosophy herself — and range over the heavens, the soul, the meaning of nobility, and the ages of a human life.”

“Dante's Latin treatise on world government: why humanity needs a single universal ruler to live in peace; why that rule belongs by right to the Roman Empire; and why the Emperor's authority comes directly from God, and not through the Pope.”

“Dante's thirteen surviving Latin letters, written in exile: to cardinals and counts, to a fellow poet, to the cities and princes of Italy, to the Emperor Henry VII — whom he hoped would bring him home — to a friend in Florence, refusing a humiliating pardon, and to his patron Can Grande, explaining the meaning of the Divine Comedy.”

“In the middle of his life, lost in a dark wood, the poet Dante is led by the shade of Virgil down through the circles of Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory, and then by his beloved Beatrice through the heavens of Paradise — to the vision of God.”