A man of the Middle Ages, immersed in his time. This is the Dante showed us by a great historian in pages of vivid beauty. Dante is the man about whom, due to the fame that accompanied him already in his lifetime, we perhaps know more things than about any other man of that era, and who has left us his personal testimony on what it meant, then, to be a young man man in love or what means to mount a horse to go into battle. Alessandro Barbero follows Dante in his adolescence as the son of a usurer who dreams of belonging to the world of nobles and men of letters; in the dark corridors of politics, where ideals crash in front of the petty reality of party hatred and rampant corruption; in the wanderings of the exiled who discovers the incredible variety of fourteenth-century Italy, between commercial metropolises and chivalrous courts. The book also deals with the gaps and silences that make the reconstruction of entire periods of Dante's life uncertain, presenting the arguments for and against the various hypotheses and allowing the reader to form his own idea, as when the reader of a mystery novel is invited to compete with the detective in order to come to a conclusion on his own.