18/08/2026
Dante Alighieri – Florence, 1265 to Ravenna, 1321. Poet, philosopher, and the man who proved that Tuscan speech could carry an epic – laying the foundations of the Italian language as we know it.
Exiled from his native city in 1302 amid the factional violence of Guelphs and Ghibellines, he never returned. It was in the long years that followed – moving between the courts of northern Italy – that he wrote the Divine Comedy, his imagined journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
Dante's life and work were fixed on the divine – on that which lies beyond what it is to be human. The poem closes on its most famous line, as he beholds this vision at last: "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle" – the love that moves the sun and the other stars. It is homage to a divine inspiration that today we call by many different names, but which still lies at the heart of so much of what we do.
Shown here created in Impruneta terracotta – clay drawn from the hills just south of the very city that shaped him.
Photography: Anders Gramer
