IV
But from the heart in a more romantic sense the most learned atmosphere is not safe, and I am reminded of another University affair of the heart which I stumbled upon in Bologna.
As we know from old coins, Bononia docet. But somewhere about 1320 Bologna ceased to teach. For there was a strike of students. An old stone relief in the Museo Civico, representing a crowned figure holding a little scholar in his lap and stretching his hands to a kneeling group, celebrates the reconciliation of the Rector with his scholars and sets down in Latin a record of the episode. “The scholars of our University being reconciled with the city, from which they had departed in resentment at the capital punishment inflicted upon their colleague Giacomo da Valenza, for the ravishing of Constanzia Zagnoni, by him beloved, the Church of Peace was erected in the year 1322, in the Via S. Mamolo and this memorial was placed there.”
What a tragic romance! What a story for a novelist, the Church, the World, and the University all intermingled, what a riot of young blood all stilled six hundred years ago!
The Doctors of that day still sit in carven state beside this memorial; learned petrifactions, holding their stone chairs for a term of centuries, Bartoluzzo de’ Preti, Reader of Civil Law, who died in 1318, and Bonandrea de’ Bonandrei, Reader of Decretals, who died in 1333. The “pleasant” Doctor this Bonandrea is styled; seasoning, no doubt, his erudition with graces of style. I figure him deeply versed in the decisions published by Gregory IX in 1234, and a profound expounder of the Isidorian Decretals.