The Florentine poet harboured by Ravenna

Florence’s ongoing grumbles about Ravenna’s claim to Dante frankly butter no parsnips. For while the Italian poet and philosopher found much to inspire him in his birth city, it was only when he was unceremoniously exiled by the city’s ruling ‘Black Guelphs’ in 1302 for his political allegiances that he started work on the most celebrated of medieval Italian poems, The Divine Comedy. La divina commedia, which Dante completed in Ravenna in 1318, is divided into three parts: ‘Inferno’, ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradiso’, and charts the writer’s journey (with Virgil as his guide) from darkness and sin to glorious light and a final, beatific vision of God.