Many people say that Dante Alighieri is "the father of Italian" and his name is widely known and appreciated.
Motivated by Does the German language have a Shakespeare?, asked on the German SE, which got very interesting answers, I would like to ask the same for Italian.
The Wikipedia article about Shakespeare's influence on the English language claims that this writer created a great deal of neologisms, phraseological expressions, sayings that became part of the language, enriching it and providing it with great literary content.
This phenomenon has to be better understood with in the complete framework of the history of the English language (a good summary can be read here).
On the other hand, nobody can question Dante's grandeur, his works are considered masterpieces not only within Italy but also abroad.
But the history is pretty different: standard Italian was born out of the Florentine dialect. Dante is considered his father right because his literary work has shaped the educated content of a language and the particular language he spoke was then chosen to be the representative language of the whole peninsula.
Both have worked in an era of rather confused set of linguistics canons and both have put those into a well-defined form.
If we focus on the lexical level, was Dante a creator of neologisms like Shakespeare or not? Did he insert expressions we still use today in the language?