[3] It is to this conspiracy, as initiating the papal interference in Florentine politics which led ultimately to Dante’s own exile, that the poet alludes in Par. xvii. 49-51, where Cacciaguida speaks from the standpoint of April 1300.
[4] See B. Barbadoro, La condanna di Dante, in Studi danteschi diretti da Michele Barbi, vol. ii.
[5] Cf. Del Lungo’s notes to La Cronica di Dino Compagni in the new Muratori (tom. ix. pt. ii.), and Luzzatto, La Cronica di Dino Compagni, p. 70, n. 1. It is clear that both Bologna and Siena sent ambassadors, but that Compagni (misled by the name) erroneously supposed Malavolti to have been a Sienese.
[6] Rime cxvi.: O. canz. xi. Torraca takes this canzone as written when Dante was in the Casentino in 1311. Boccaccio speaks of an earlier stay of the poet in that region. It should be noted that Del Lungo has argued that Dante, after withdrawing from the active measures of the Bianchi, remained in Tuscany, or near at hand, until the dissolution of the party in 1307, when he may have gone to Verona.
[7] We know from the Purgatorio that Dante at some time visited Lucca, where a lady, said to have been Gentucca Morla, made the city pleasant to him. Dante’s words seem to imply no more than an agreeable friendship (Purg. xxiv. 43-45). This visit may have been at an earlier date.
[8] Cf. A. Della Torre, L’epistola all’ Amico fiorentino, in Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, n.s. xii.; M. Barbi, Per un passo dell’ epistola all’ Amico fiorentino, in Studi danteschi, ii.
[9] In 1350 Boccaccio was commissioned by the captains of Or San Michele, a religious confraternity at Florence, to convey a sum of money to “Suora Beatrice, daughter of the late Dante Alighieri,” a Dominican nun in the monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi at Ravenna. This Suora Beatrice is mentioned, as no longer living, in a document of 1371. In a document of 1332, the only children of the poet who appear, together with his widow Gemma, are Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia (of whom we know nothing more). It seems, therefore, probable that Dante had one daughter, Antonia, who, after 1332 (perhaps after the death of her mother), entered religion at Ravenna as Suora Beatrice. See O. Bacci, “Beatrice di Dante,” in Giornale Dantesco, viii. pp. 465-471.
CHAPTER II
DANTE’S MINOR ITALIAN WORKS
1. The “Vita Nuova”
Guido Guinizelli is acknowledged by Dante himself as his master in poetic art and the founder of the great new school of Italian poetry: “The father of me and of the others, my betters, who ever used sweet and gracious rhymes of love” (Purg. xxvi. 97). Guido’s “Canzone of the Gentle Heart”: