Books By Dante Alighieri, Robin Kirkpatrick - Author

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265. He studied at the university of Bologna, married at the age of twenty and had four children. His first major work was La Vita Nuova (1292), a tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life who had died two years earlier. In 1302, Dante's political activism resulted in his being exiled from Florence. After years of wandering, he settled in Ravenna and in about 1307 began writing The Divine Comedy. Dante died in 1321.

Robin Kirkpatrick is a poet and widely-published Dante scholar. He has taught courses on Dante's Divine Comedy in Hong Kong, Dublin and Cambridge, where is Fellow of Robinson College and Professor of Italian and English Literatures.