• He had the face of the “Wicked Witch of the West,” and by some reports, the imperious disposition to match.

• He was a failed politician in his own city, and was exiled for his pains.

• He claimed a lifelong love for a woman with whom he may have exchanged only a few sentences, and more often than not, she treated him with disdain.

• He was born 700 years ago in a world fraught with petty but tragic intrigue, common brutality, and horrendous inquisition, all performed at the whim of both a church and state that met with his approval.

• He was a poet whose greatest work was written in his own vulgar tongue, a language he believed would be made the common speech of an all-encompassing European Empire. It was finished almost literally on his deathbed, and could not have been read in its entirety during his lifetime, so why should anyone care to read it, or about him, now?

• Why? Because he was Dante Aligheri, the greatest tourist (even if the tour was only a literary fantasy) this world and the next has ever known and, when one sees past the prurient and horribly satisfying grotesqueries of his sojourn in the inferno, he is, and will forever be, the great poet, the prophet, the visionary champion of love.