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Why this one poem is in everybody's mouth
The Commedia occupies a position in Italy that no single work holds in English. It is read in full across the last three years of secondary school, cantos are memorised, and lines from it turn up in newspapers, football commentary and parliamentary insults without attribution because none is needed — nel mezzo del cammin, lasciate ogne speranza, galeotto fu il libro, non ragioniam di lor. Dante is il sommo poeta or simply il poeta, and since 2020 there has been an official Dantedì on 25 March, the date the poem's journey is reckoned to begin. Note the thing this does to the language: an educated Italian's sense of what Italian can do is calibrated on a text from the 1310s, which is part of why the written register stays as formal as it does. The historical reason the poem is legible is that it helped decide what Italian would be. Dante wrote in Florentine when Latin was the language of serious work, argued the case for doing so in a Latin treatise, and wrote well enough that two centuries later, when Italy needed a written standard, his dialect was the obvious candidate. Lesson 81 described the result and Lesson 98 describes who finished the job. So the sequence runs backwards from what a learner expects: Italian is not the language Dante wrote in, it is the language that was built from what Dante wrote. Which is also why a fourteen-year-old in Palermo and a fourteen-year-old in Udine both meet it as their own.