The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

and thus attired they move about laced up to the throat, with all sorts of animals hanging as ornaments about their necks. Their sleeves, or rather their sacks, as they should be called⁠—was there ever so useless and pernicious a fashion! Can any of them reach a glass or take a morsel from the table without dirtying herself or the cloth by the things she knocks down? And thus do the young men, and worse; and such sleeves are made even for sucking babes. The women go about in hoods and cloaks; most of the young men without cloaks, in long, flowing hair, and if they throw off their breeches, which from their smallness may easily be done, all is off, for they literally stick their posteriors into a pair of socks and expend a yard of cloth on their wristbands, while more stuff is put into a glove than a cloak-hood. However, I am comforted by one thing, and that is, that all now have begun to put their feet in chains, perhaps as a penance for the many vain things they are guilty of; for we are but a day in this world, and in that day the fashion is changed a thousand times: all seek liberty, yet all deprive themselves of it: God has made our feet free, and many with long pointed toes to their shoes can scarcely walk: he has supplied the legs with hinges, and many have so bound them up with close lacing that they can scarcely sit: the bust is tightly bandaged up; the arms trail their drapery along; the throat is rolled in a capuchin; the head so loaded and bound round with caps over the hair that it appears as though it were sawed off. And thus I might go on forever discoursing of female absurdities, commencing with the immeasurable trains at their feet, and proceeding regularly upwards to the head, with which they may always be seen occupied in their chambers; some curling, some smoothing, and some whitening it, so that they often kill themselves with colds caught in these vain occupations.”

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Statius. ↩

Continuation of the punishment of Gluttony. ↩

Continuing the words with which the preceding canto closes, and referring to Statius. ↩

Piccarda, sister of Forese and Corso Donati. She was a nun of Santa Clara, and is seen by Dante in the first heaven of Paradise, which Forese calls “high Olympus.” See Paradiso III 49, where her story is told more in detail. ↩

Buonagiunta Urbisani of Lucca is one of the early minor poets of Italy, a contemporary of Dante. Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 77, gives some specimens of his sonnets and canzoni. All that is known of him is contained in Benvenuto’s brief notice:⁠—

“Buonagiunta of Urbisani, an honorable man of the city of Lucca, a brilliant orator in his mother tongue, a facile producer of rhymes, and still more facile consumer of wines; who knew our author in his lifetime, and sometimes corresponded with him.”

Tiraboschi also mentions him, Storia della Lett., IV 397:⁠—

“He was seen by Dante in Purgatory punished among the Gluttons, from which vice, it is proper to say, poetry did not render him exempt.”

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Pope Martin the Fourth, whose fondness for the eels of Bolsena brought his life to a sudden close, and his soul to this circle of Purgatory, has been ridiculed in the well-known epigram⁠—

“Gaudent anguillae, quod mortuus hic jacet ille
Qui quasi morte reas excoriabat eas.”

“Martin the Fourth,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VI 143, “was born at Mont Pence in Brie; he had been Canon of Tours. He put on at first the show of maintaining the lofty character of the Churchman. He excommunicated the Viterbans for their sacrilegious maltreatment of the Cardinals; Rinaldo Annibaldeschi, the Lord of Viterbo, was compelled to ask pardon on his knees of the Cardinal Rosso, and forgiven only at the intervention of the Pope. Martin the Fourth retired to Orvieto.

“But the Frenchman soon began to predominate over the Pontiff; he sunk into the vassal of Charles of Anjou. The great policy of his predecessor, to assuage the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline, was an Italian policy; it was altogether abandoned. The Ghibellines in every city were menaced or smitten with excommunication; the Lambertazzi were driven from Bologna. Forli was placed under interdict for harboring the exiles; the goods of the citizens were confiscated for the benefit of the Pope. Bertoldo Orsini was deposed from the Countship of Romagna; the office was bestowed on John of Appia, with instructions everywhere to coerce or to chastise the refractory Ghibellines.”

Villani, Book VI Ch. 106, says:⁠—

“He was a good man, and very favorable to Holy Church and to those of the house of France, because he was from Tours.”

He is said to have died of a surfeit. The eels and sturgeon of Bolsena, and the wines of Orvieto and Montefiascone, in the neighborhood of whose vineyards he lived, were too much for him. But he died in Perugia, not in Orvieto. ↩

The Lake of Bolsena is in the Papal States, a few miles northwest of Viterbo, on the road from Rome to Siena. It is thus described in Murray’s Handbook of Central Italy, p. 199:⁠—

“Its circular form, and being in the centre of a volcanic district, hashed to its being regarded as an extinct crater; but that hypothesis can scarcely be admitted when the great extent of the lake is considered. The treacherous beauty of the lake conceals malaria in its most fatal forms; and its shores, although there are no traces of a marsh, are deserted, excepting where a few sickly hamlets are scattered on their western slopes. The ground is cultivated in many parts down to the water’s edge, but the laborers dare not sleep for