Convivio, or The Banquet, is an unfinished work written during Dante's exile. It sets out to offer readers who lack formal learning a feast of knowledge. Dante presents several of his own poems, each followed by a long prose commentary that explains its meaning. The commentaries range over philosophy, ethics, astronomy, politics and the nature of nobility. He also defends the use of Italian instead of Latin for serious thought. The book shows how Dante's mind worked between his early love poetry and his great epic.