The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri [best thriller novels of all time TXT] 📗

three miles round the ramparts, believed that all was city like that within the Roman walls; and this was independent of the rich palaces, towers, courts, and walled gardens at a greater distance, which in other countries would be denominated castles. In short,’ he continues, ‘it is estimated that within a circuit of six miles round the town there are rich and noble dwellings enough to make two cities like Florence.’ And Ariosto seems to have caught the same idea when he exclaims⁠—

‘While gazing on thy villa-studded hills
’Twould seem as though the earth grew palaces
As she is wont by nature to bring forth
Young shoots, and leafy plants, and flowery shrubs:
And if within one wall and single name
Could be collected all thy scattered halls,
Two Romes would scarcely form thy parallel.’ ”

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The “which” in this line refers to Montemalo of the preceding. ↩

Bellincion Berti, whom Dante selects as a type of the good citizen of Florence in the olden time, and whom Villani calls “the best and most honored gentleman of Florence,” was of the noble family of the Ravignani. He was the father of the “good Gualdrada,” whose story shines out so pleasantly in Boccaccio’s commentary. See Note 224. ↩

“Two ancient houses of the city,” says the Ottimo; “and he saw the chiefs of these houses were content with leathern jerkins without any drapery; he who should dress so nowadays would be laughed at: and he saw their dames spinning, as who should say, ‘Nowadays not even the maid will spin, much less the lady.’ ” And Buti upon the same text:⁠—

“They wore leathern dresses without any cloth over them; they did not make to themselves long robes, nor cloaks of scarlet lined with vaire, as they do now.”

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They were not abandoned by their husbands, who, content with little, did not go to traffic in France. ↩

Monna Cianghella della Tosa was a gay widow of Florence, who led such a life of pleasure that her name has passed into a proverb, or a common name for a dissolute woman.

Lapo Salterello was a Florentine lawyer, and a man of dissipated habits; and Crescimbeni, whose mill grinds everything that comes to it, counts him among the poets, Volgar Poesia, III 82, and calls him a Rimatore di non poco grido, a rhymer of no little renown. Unluckily he quotes one of his sonnets. ↩

Quinctius, surnamed Cincinnatus from his neglected locks, taken from his plough and made Dictator by the Roman Senate, and, after he had defeated the Volscians and saved the city, returning to his plough again.

Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and mother of the Gracchi, who preferred for her husband a Roman citizen to a king, and boasted that her children were her only jewels.

Shakespeare, Tit. Andron., IV 1:⁠—

“Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care
Read to her sons, than she hath read to thee
Sweet poetry, and Tally’s Orator.”

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The Virgin Mary, invoked in the pains of childbirth, as mentioned Purgatorio XX 19:⁠—

“And I by peradventure heard ‘Sweet Mary!’
Uttered in front of us amid the weeping,
Even as a woman does who is in child-birth.”

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The Baptistery of the church of St. John in Florence; il mio bel San Giovanni, my beautiful St. John, as Dante calls it, Inferno XIX 17. ↩

Of this ancestor of Dante, Cacciaguida, nothing is known but what the poet here tells us, and so clearly that it is not necessary to repeat it in prose. ↩

Cacciaguida’s wife came from Ferrara in the Val di Pado, or Val di Po, the Valley of the Po. She was of the Aldighieri or Alighieri family, and from her Dante derived his surname. ↩

The Emperor Conrad III of Swabia, uncle of Frederic Barbarossa. In 1143 he joined Louis VII of France in the Second Crusade, of which St. Bernard was the great preacher. He died in 1152, after his return from this crusade. ↩

Cacciaguida was knighted by the Emperor Conrad. ↩

The law or religion of Muhammad. ↩

The Heaven of Mars continued.

Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book III Prosa 6, Ridpath’s Tr.:⁠—

“But who is there that does not perceive the emptiness and futility of what men dignify with the name of high extraction, or nobility of birth? The splendor you attribute to this is quite foreign to you: for nobility of descent is nothing else but the credit derived from the merit of your ancestors. If it is the applause of mankind, and nothing besides, that illustrates and confers fame upon a person, no others can be celebrated and famous, but such as are universally applauded. If you are not therefore esteemed illustrious from your own worth, you can derive no real splendor from the merits of others: so that, in my opinion, nobility is in no other respect good, than as it imposes an obligation upon its possessors not to degenerate from the merit of their ancestors.”

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The use of You for Thou, the plural for the singular, is said to have been introduced in the time of Julius Caesar. Lucan, V, Rowe’s Tr.:⁠—

“Then was the time when sycophants began
To heap all titles on one lordly man.”

Dante uses it by way of compliment to his ancestor; though he says the descendants of the Romans were not so persevering in its use as other Italians. ↩

Beatrice smiled to give notice to Dante that she observed his flattering style of address; as the Lady of Malehault coughed when she saw Launcelot kiss Queen Guinevere, as related in the old romance of Launcelot of the Lake. ↩

Rejoiced within itself