In 1302, caught on the wrong side in one of Florence’s perpetual factional struggles, Dante Alighieri was fined and banished on a probably trumped-up charge of corruption in political office; summoned home from Ravenna the following year, he refused to come, and his sentence was commuted to death by burning. Now Dante’s great-great-many-times-great-grandson, astrophysicist Sperello di Serego Alighieri, is working to get his ancestor exonerated. – The Guardian
