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Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

Just over five years ago in the beautiful Tuscan City of Florence, the City Council voted

not unanimously but by a majority to revoke a sentence of execution

on one of its most famous sons, Dante Alie to the details of his exile in a while, but the good news is that by a vote of 19 to 5, the

Council finally said that if he returned, he would no longer expect to be burnt at the stake.

Poor old Dante. He wandered Italy and beyond for almost 20 years before he

died but it was during this time that he wrote the divine comedy a wondrous three-part journey through Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise.

It's part of an account of his own rage and his longing to return to Florence. My guest, who's chosen Dante, who was born, we think, around 1265 and who died in exile in 1321, is Sarah Vine, outspoken columnist for the Daily Mail, and one half of a London Power

couple recently featuring on a fashionable magazine's most wanted dinner guest list.

She told my producer before this recording that whenever I have too much to drink I bang on about Dante.

So Sarah, what is it exactly that you bang on about in Dante?

Well I have a monumental crush on Dante Allegheny which I think

began probably at university but the seeds of it was at school in Italy grew up in Italy. I went to an Italian school until the age of 15 and the reason I bang on about him is that he coincides with a period in my life. My sort of discovery of him and his work coincides with a period in my life, my sort of discovery of him and his work,

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