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

a single night during the summer or autumn on the plains where they work by day; and a large tract of beautiful and productive country is reduced to a perfect solitude by this invisible calamity. Nothing can be more striking than the appearance of the lake, without a single sail upon its waters, and with scarcely a human habitation within sight of Bolsena; and nothing perhaps can give the traveller who visits Italy for the first time a more impressive idea of the effects of malaria.”

Of the Vernaccia or Vernage, in which Pope Martin cooked his eels, Henderson says. The History of Ancient and Modern Wines, p. 296:⁠—

“The Vernage⁠ ⁠… was a red wine, of a bright color, and a sweetish and somewhat rough flavor, which was grown in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, and derived its name from the thick-skinned grape, vernaccia (corresponding with the vinaciola of the ancients), that was used in the preparation of it.”

Chaucer mentions it in the “Merchant’s Tale”:⁠—

“He drinketh ipocras, clarre, and vernage
Of spices hot, to encreasen his corage.”

And Redi, “Bacchus in Tuscany,” Leigh Hunt’s Tr., p. 30, sings of it thus:⁠—

“If anybody doesn’t like Vernaccia,
I mean that sort that’s made in Pietrafitta,
Let him fly
My violent eye;
I curse him, clean, through all the Alpha-beta.”

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Ovid, Metamorphoses VII, says of Erisichthon, that he

“Deludes his throat with visionary fare,
Feasts on the wind and banquets on the air.”

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Ubaldin dalla Pila was a brother of the Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, mentioned Inferno X 120, and father of the Archbishop Ruggieri, Inferno XXXIII 14. According to Sacchetti, Nov. 205, he passed most of his time at his castle, and turned his gardener into a priest; “and Messer Ubaldino,” continues the novelist, “put him into his church; of which one may say he made a pigsty; for he did not put in a priest, but a pig in the way of eating and drinking, who had neither grammar nor any good thing in him.”

Some writers say that this Boniface, Archbishop of Ravenna, was a son of Ubaldino; but this is confounding him with Ruggieri, Archbishop of Pisa. He was of the Fieschi of Genoa. His pasturing many people alludes to his keeping a great retinue and court, and the free life they led in matters of the table. ↩

Messer Marchese da Forlì, who answered the accusation made against him, that “he was always drinking,” by saying, that “he was always thirsty.” ↩

A lady of Lucca with whom Dante is supposed to have been enamored. “Let us pass over in silence,” says Balbo, Life and Times of Dante, II 177, “the consolations and errors of the poor exile.” But Buti says:⁠—

“He formed an attachment to a gentle lady, called Madonna Gentucca, of the family of Rossimpelo, on account of her great virtue and modesty, and not with any other love.”

Benvenuto and the Ottimo interpret the passage differently, making gentucca a common noun⁠—gente bassa, low people. But the passage which immediately follows, in which a maiden is mentioned who should make Lucca pleasant to him, seems to confirm the former interpretation. ↩

In the throat of the speaker, where he felt the hunger and thirst of his punishment. ↩

Chaucer, Complaint of the Blacke Knight, 194:⁠—

“But even like as doth a skrivenere,
That can no more tell what that he shal write,
But as his maister beside dothe indite.”

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A canzone of the Vita Nuova, beginning, in Rossetti’s version, Early Italian Poets, p. 255:⁠—

“Ladies that have intelligence in love,
Of mine own lady I would speak with you;
Not that I hope to count her praises through,
But, telling what I may, to ease my mind.”

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Jacopo da Lentino, or “the Notary,” was a Sicilian poet who flourished about 1250, in the later days of the Emperor Frederick the Second. Crescimbeni, L’Istoria Della Volgar Poesia, III 43, says that Dante “esteemed him so highly, that he even mentions him in his Comedy, doing him the favor to put him into Purgatory.” Tassoni, and others after him, make the careless statement that he addressed a sonnet to Petrarca. He died before Petrarca was born. Rossetti gives several specimens of his sonnets and canzonette in his Early Italian Poets, of which the following is one:⁠—

“Of his Lady in Heaven.

“I have it in my heart to serve God so
That into Paradise I shall repair⁠—
The holy place through the which everywhere
I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
Without my lady I were loath to go⁠—
She who has the bright face and the bright hair;
Because if she were absent, I being there,
My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.
Look you, I say not this to such intent
As that I there would deal in any sin:
I only would behold her gracious mien,
And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
That so it should be my complete content
To see my lady joyful in her place.”

Fra Guittone d’ Arezzo, a contemporary of the Notary, was one of the Frati Gaudenti, or Jovial Friars, mentioned in Note 336. He first brought the Italian Sonnet to the perfect form it has since preserved, and left behind the earliest specimens of Italian letter-writing. These letters are written in a very florid style, and are perhaps more poetical than his verses, which certainly fall very far short of the “sweet new style.” Of all his letters the best is that “To the Florentines,” from which a brief extract is given Note 615. ↩

Corso Donati, the brother of Forese who is here speaking, and into whose mouth nothing but Ghibelline wrath could have put these words. Corso was the leader of the Neri