Indeed. I began studying Italian just for it.
They say Dante was the first to present humans as specific products of their historical circumstances and not as various heroic types as in Classical times or as the sum of their virtues as in biographies of the saints at the time.
Interesting argument.
Basically, the way I see it is that the stilo nuovo poets of the Sicilian Renaissance taking place at the Hohenstaufen court in the late 1100s saw themselves as recreating the Roman tradition of occasional and satiric court poetry which lampooned or complimented real people.
So their brief lyric poems incorporated references to living people they knew - their faults and failings as well as virtues.
The troubadour poets who followed in the 1200s imitated this trend in their songs and it filtered through to the Tuscan sonneteers of the era just before Dante who engaged in back-and-forth response poetry about real life events and people - kind of like battle-rapping today.
Dante was the first person to take a high-minded view of all this and import such practices into epic-length poetry, but he was drawing on a rich preexisting tradition. The Comedy is very self-referential in this regard by making such predecessors of his in "reality verse" characters in the Comedy from Horace to recent contemporaries.