sented here by a sonnet addressed to Guido Cavalcanti,[1] which is all the more interesting, as the same writer's historical work furnishes so much of the little known about Guido. Dino, though one of the noblest citizens of Florence, was devoted to the popular cause, and held successively various high offices in the state. The date of his birth is not fixed, but he must have been at least thirty in 1289, as he was one of the Priori in that year, a post which could not be held by a younger man. He died at Florence in 1323. Dino has rather lately assumed for the modern reader a much more important position than he occupied before among the early Italian poets. I allude to the valuable discovery, in the Magliabecchian Library at Florence, of a poem by him in nona rima, containing 309 stanzas. It is entitled " L'Intelligenza," and is of an allegorical nature intespersed with historical and legendary abstracts.[2]
I have placed Lapo Gianni in this my first division on account of the sonnet by Dante (page 126), in which he seems undoubtedly to be the Lapo referred to. It has been supposed by some that Lapo degli Uberti (father of Fazio, and brother-in-law of Guido Cavalcanti) is meant; but this is hardly possible. Dante and Guido seem to have been in familiar intercourse with the Lapo of the sonnet at the time when it and others were written; whereas no Uberti can have been in Florence after the year 1267, when the Ghibellines were expelled; the Uberti family (as I have mentioned elsewhere) being the one of all others which was most jealously kept afar and excluded from every amnesty. The only information which I can find respecting Lapo Gianni is the statement
- ↑ Crescimbeni (1st. d. Volg. Poes.) gives this sonnet from a MS., where it is headed "To Guido Guinicelli"; but he surmises, and I have no doubt correctly, that Cavalcanti is really the person addressed in it.
- ↑ See Documents inédits pour servir à l'histoire littéraire de l'Italie, &c., par A. F. Ozanam (Paris, 1850), where the poem is printed entire.
