The Renaissance period is an era to be remembered for a variety of reasons, including the production of great literary pieces of work. Many famous writers became prominent during this period. Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio are a few good examples of these types of writers. All three of them shared the same views in respect to how "life is a journey". However, each individual expressed theirs views differently. All three of them presented the three main elements of the Florentine Society during the Renaissance, which were the "popolo vecchio, popolo grasso, and popolo minuto" (Symonds, p.5)
The Divine Comedy was written during the period of Dante's exile from his native city of Florence. It was begun perhaps as early as 1307 and the Inferno was complete by 1314. Dante worked on the remaining two thirds of the poem, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, in the remaining seven years of his life.
Gustave Doré's illustration to Dante's Inferno. P...
English: Dante Alighieri's portrait by Sandro Bott...
Domenico di Michelino, La Divina Commedia di Dante...The fictional setting of the narrative, however, is 1300, a year and a half before his exile was to begin, during the great Jubilee Year called by Pope Boniface VIII. In the fiction of Dante, the exiled poet, the younger Dante is at the height of his political success (having just been elected to the governing council of Florence), and is widely respected as a talented love poet and as an intellectual of universal interests. He would have had no reason to anticipate his abrupt downfall through partisan politics in the near future.
From the perspective of his later life, however, Dante the poet looks back upon what the world would call his period of greatest success, and referred to it as a time of moral failure. To be specific, the poem begins with Dante lost in a famous symbolic landscape (lost in the...