Dante Alighieri was banished from Florence on pain of death and never returned. He spent the last nineteen years of his life wandering Italy as a political exile, writing the Divine Comedy — the poem that invented the Italian literary language and mapped the Christian afterlife so vividly that it shaped how the Western world imagines heaven and hell to this day. After his death, Florence and Ravenna fought over his bones for centuries.

This episode traces Dante from his youthful love for Beatrice through the political faction wars that exiled him, the composition of the Comedy in wandering exile, and the centuries-long dispute over his remains that became its own kind of comedy.

• Dante’s love for Beatrice Portinari and the Vita Nuova that immortalized her
• The Guelph-Ghibelline factional politics that got Dante exiled from Florence forever
• The Divine Comedy — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — written in exile over fourteen years
• The centuries-long fight between Florence and Ravenna over Dante’s bones