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The open Comedy, written in the Tuscan of his own street rather than Latin. The decision made a language and eventually a country.

Dante Alighieri was a Florentine politician on the losing side. In 1301, while he was away in Rome on an embassy, a rival faction took the city with French help; in January 1302 he was convicted in absentia of corruption and sentenced to a fine and two years' exile, and when he did not appear the sentence was upgraded to death by fire if he were ever caught inside Florentine territory. He never went back. He spent the remaining 19 years of his life moving between Verona, Bologna and Ravenna, and later wrote the line every exile has borrowed since: how salt the taste of another man's bread, how hard the going up and down another man's stairs. He wrote the Comedy in that condition, and he wrote it in Italian. That was the decision with consequences. Serious work was written in Latin; the vernacular was for love songs and shopping lists. Dante wrote a hundred cantos on the structure of the universe in the Tuscan of his own street, and made the Tuscan of his own street into the language a country would eventually be assembled around. He also settled scores in it. Hell is populated with people he knew, addressed by name, including three popes, and the reader is expected to recognize the local politicians. He died in Ravenna in 1321 of malaria caught on a diplomatic trip, and Florence has been trying to get the body back ever since. Ravenna has consistently declined. In 1519 the pope granted a Florentine petition for the remains; the tomb was opened and found empty, because the Franciscans had quietly cut a hole in the wall and taken the bones. They stayed hidden until 1865, when workmen doing repairs found a wooden box with an inscription explaining who was inside. Domenico di Michelino painted this in 1465, for the wall of Florence cathedral, on commission from the city that had condemned him: the poet in red with the book open, hell going down on the left, purgatory as a terraced mountain behind him, and on the right the walls of Florence with Brunelleschi's dome on them, finished 30 years after the painting's subject would have known the skyline. The gate he is standing outside is the city's, and he is on the wrong side of it.