In his lectures upon Poetry one of his most eager pupils would seem to have been his best friend and host, Guido Novello, who evidently knew well at least those parts of the Divine Comedy, chiefly the Inferno be it noted, which deal with his ancestors, for he quotes one of the most famous of them—an unforgettable line spoken by his aunt Francesca da Rimini:
"Questi che mai da me non fia diviso."
in a sonnet of his own[2].
[Footnote 2: Cf. Ultimo Rifugio, p. 384, where the sonnet is given in full.]
After the lord Guido Novello, we must name the archbishop of Ravenna, Rainaldo Concorreggio, as among Dante's friends. It is possible that he had known Dante at the University of Bologna and he had been a chaplain of Boniface VIII. He was a brave man, learned in theology, law, and music, and devoted to his religion, an eager student, and he had composed a treatise which has come down to us upon Galla Placidia and her church.
And then there was Giotto who came to paint if not in S. Maria in Porto fuori, certainly in S. Giovanni Evangelista. He was Dante's dear friend and it was probably at the poet's suggestion he had been invited to Ravenna. We do not know whether these two men attended Dante's lectures. But the true audience there which came simply to hear was probably various, consisting of poets, notaries, and all sorts of men, some of whom were Dante's friends and companions. There was Ser Dino Perini, Ser Pietro di Messer Giardino—he was a notary—and Fiduccio dei Milotti, who walked with Dante in the Pineta. All these names have come down to us in the Latin eclogues written by Dante while in Ravenna to his friend Giovanni del Virgilio—del Virgilio because he could so well imitate Virgil.
These eclogues are full of shrewd and curious thought, a real correspondence, and they help us to see the men who surrounded the poet in Ravenna. They do not, however, give us so extraordinary an impression of the strength and keenness of Dante's powers of observation as many a passage in the Divine Comedy in which Ravenna and the rude and fierce world of the Romagna of that day live for ever. It is in answer to the inquiries of the great Guido of Montefeltro that Dante speaks of Romagna in the Inferno. Feeble and anaemic though the great lines become in any translation, even so all their virtue is not lost:
"Never was thy Romagna without war
In her proud tyrants' bosoms, nor is now;
But open war there left I none. The state
Ravenna hath maintained this many a year
Is steadfast. There Polenta's eagle[1] broods,
And in his broad circumference of plume
O'ershadows Cervia[2]. The green talons[3] grasp
The land, that stood e'erwhile the proof so long
And piled in bloody heap the host of France.
The old mastiff of Verrucchio and the young[4]
That tore Montagna[5] in their wrath still make
Where they are wont, an augre of their fangs,
Lamone's[6] city and Santerno's[7] range
Under the lion of the snowy lair[8],
Inconstant partisan, that changeth sides
Or ever summer yields to winter's frost.
And she whose flank is washed of Savio's wave[9]
As 'twixt the level and the steep she lies,
Lives so 'twixt tyrant power and liberty."
[Footnote 1: The coat of the Polenta.]
[Footnote 2: Cervia, the least secure of the Polenta possessions.]