Written between 1304 and 1308, the Convivio had been conceived as a vernacular encyclopaedia of medieval knowledge, in fifteen treatises, the first being a general introduction while the other fourteen were to provide commentaries on the text and allegory of fifteen of his canzoni. However, probably because he was already busy writing the Commedia, Dante’s work on the Convivio stopped with the fourth treatise. 

As one reads in the introduction, Dante’s intention was to offer a “banquet” of knowledge, in which his songs are the dish, and his prose commentary the bread (I, 11). The author aimed not at academics and scholarly readers, but at all those whose responsibilities in daily life were such that they had not been able to learn the language of the classics. For this reason, as he passionately argues in his introduction, he makes use of the vernacular. In the second treatise, the author provides a commentary on his canzone Voi, che ’ntendendo, dealing with the problem of interpretation on the basis of the four meanings of the Scriptures (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical), and their underlying theme of the celestial spheres and angelic hierarchies. In the third treatise, his commentary on Amor che ne la mente offers a pretext for celebrating the donna gentile, an allegory for Philosophy, as the only way to reach happiness in this life. Significantly longer than the previous three treatises, the fourth is a commentary on Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia, with lengthy digressions but which makes no use of allegorical interpretation. Two digressions of particular note are his redefinition of nobility as an individual’s moral and intellectual virtues, and his discourse on the role of the Empire.

As evidence also of Dante’s profound familiarity with Aristotle, Albert the Great and Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Convivio offers the first example of Italian vernacular prose on serious doctrinal matters, with Latin-based syntactic structures used to great effect in his argumentation.