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Dante was born in Florence, Italy into one of the city's most powerful noble families. When Dante was thirty-six, a rival family came to power in Florence. They forced him into exile and for the last twenty years of his life he was never able to return home.
During that time, Dante wrote a long poem showing how a person could find peace. These lines about his own exile show the eloquence that makes Dante's writing so impressive. If you are ever driven from your home, Dante tells his readers,
"You'll find how bitter someone else's bread is, / how hard it is to climb another person's stairs."
Unlike other writers of his day who wrote in Latin, Dante used the local language, Italian, an innovation that led other European writers to use their local languages, too.