Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/540

NOTES who ignored him. Boccaccio (Decam, G. ix. 4) tells the story of how he was robbed of his clothes by a friend.

31. Quando Ner Piccolin... 5. mescianza, one of Neri Piccolin's French tricks of speech.

 (page 82). Little is known of him. For the legend of his share in the discovery of the first seven cantos of the Divina Commedia, v. Boccaccio, Vita di Dante.

 (page 82). Held legal office in Florence from 1298 to 1328. A friend of Dante and of Cavalcanti.

 (page 83). Wrote a cycle of sonnets on the various diversions of a knight during the year and was probably a member of the brigata spenderaccia to which Dante alludes in Inf. xxix.

 (page 86). Born in Florence, in the Sesto di San Piero Maggiore. Studied philosophy and rhetoric, and was influenced by, though rot actually a pupil of, Brunetto Latini. Probably attended lectures at Bologna, and possibly in Paris; there seems to be no evidence that he did so in Oxford. He fought on the Guelf side at Campaldino, where the Aretines were defeated in 1289, and at the capture of the castle of Caprona, held by the Pisans, in the same year. (Inferno, xxi. 94.) He saw Beatrice, daughter of Folco Portinari, for the first time in 1274 when he was nine years old; the story of his love is written in the Vita Nuova and in the wonderful canto of the Purgatorio which describes his meeting with her divine semblance. She was married to Simone de' Bardi in 1288 and died in 1290. Dante married, about 1295, Gemma di Manetto Donati, by whom he had two sons and two daughters. He was enrolled in the arte de' medici e speziali, and entered public life in 1295, when he was a member of the Consiglio speciale del Capitano. In 1296, 540