Who wrote the Divine Comedy?

Dante, who wrote it in exile under sentence of death - Florence had banished him in a factional purge and decreed that he would be burned alive if he returned. He never went back, and he spent the poem settling accounts, placing political enemies and several popes in hell by name.

Writing it in Italian was the radical choice. Serious work was written in Latin; Dante used the Tuscan vernacular, deliberately, so it could be read by people who were not scholars - and the poem's success is a substantial part of why Tuscan became standard Italian. He effectively selected the national language by being the best writer in it.

It is a comedy in the structural sense - it ends well - and only the first third is the famous part. Hell is vivid and populated by people Dante knew; Purgatory is about repair; Paradise is about light and abstraction and is far less read. The architecture is obsessive: three canticles, a hundred cantos, terza rima interlocking so tightly that a line cannot be removed without breaking the chain, and each canticle ending on the word stars.