Dante Alighieri was a major Italian poet of the Late Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. He defied poetic convention by writing in vernacular Italian instead of Latin - this made his work accessible to a wider, more diverse audience and set a precedent that Petrarch and Boccaccioto would follow.