Who was Dante Aligheri Rossetti? Born on this day in A.D. 1265

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Minnesota Public Radio, Garrison Keillor):

June 1 is the day we celebrate the birth of Dante, born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. No one knows for sure the exact date. What is known about the poet is that he met his great love and muse, Beatrice, when he was about nine years old; it was love at first sight. Three years later, he was promised in marriage to another girl, but that didn't stop him from writing about Beatrice in his poetry, where he referred to her as his main reason for living.
Dante had political aspirations, and because the law held that public officials had to be a member of one of the professional guilds, he became a pharmacist. He had wanted the Vatican to have less influence over Florence -- but opposing forces came to power, and he was exiled to Rome. With his fortunes left behind and his great love Beatrice now dead, Dante had nothing but time to devote to his poetry; it was then, toward the end of his life, that he began work on his Divine Comedy.
Dante chose to write the poem in colloquial Italian rather that Latin, which had been the language for Western literature for more than a thousand years. It was also the first epic poem in Western literary history in which the author served as the main character.
He was 55 when he died of malaria, shortly after completing Paradiso, the third and final part of Divine Comedy, following the Inferno and Purgatorio. In the years after his death, as the influence of his work helped establish Italian as the world's accepted language of great literature, his hometown of Florence came to regret having banished Dante, and requested that his remains be transferred back for burial, but it wasn't until 2008 that the city officially rescinded his sentence of perpetual exile.