Dante is one of the towering figures of medieval European literature. This biography indicates that Dante may have smoked cannabis to reach new heights of creativity. It tells that Dante was a talented public speaker, who created a quite new form of poetic art, holding audiences spellbound. A lavish vita, it is also an extraordinarily vivid and incisive chronicle of the dynamics and titanic clashes in Italian and European political life at the time ? It is a detailed cultural and intellectual map of the times, and a gripping intertextual reading of Dante's works, interlacing fine scholarly detail with the universal themes and emotions that have made Dante's words almost archetypal for Western consciousness ... Never dryly archaeological, invariably intelligent, this is a riveting account of Dante the man in all his manifestations.