(1260-ca. 1312) poet
Cecco Angiolieri was born in Siena to parents An-gioliero degli Angelioleri and Lisa Salimbeni. As a youth he entered military service, where he was reprimanded several times for unauthorized absences and once for making noise after curfew. In 1288 he served in a military campaign where he is thought to have met fellow poet dante. Angiolieri’s later history is equally colorful: In 1291 he was accused but not convicted of stabbing a man, and sometime in the next decade he was banished from Siena. In 1302 he sold a vineyard to a neighbor for a tidy profit, but in 1313, after his death, his five children renounced their claims to his estate to avoid the huge debts placed upon it.
Of Angiolieri’s poetry, 150 sonnets survive. He wrote in a realistic and burlesque style, and translator Thomas Caldecot Chubb says that “his is the best and the most vivid writing of this interesting school.” Angiolieri often introduces a comedic touch into the conventional depictions of love and lovers. His sonnets to Becchina, the shoemaker’s daughter, show him using the tropes of love with laudable skill:
Whatever good is naturally done Is born ofLove as fruit is born offlowers: By Love all good is brought to its full power.
In other sonnets, he parodies those who are slaves to love and celebrates his freedom, as in this playful verse in which the poet says, Love is no lord of mine, I’m proud to vouch. So let no woman who is born conceive That I’ll be her liege slave. . . .
Angiolieri also wrote three bantering poems to his friend Dante, one of which respectfully points out how Dante appears to contradict himself in the last sonnet of his New Life. Angiolieri’s contemporaries spared him no less in their own literary works; Boccaccio portrays him as a gambler and prankster in the Decameron, which no doubt contributed to Angiolieri’s reputation, in Chubb’s terms, as a handsome and well-mannered rogue.
An English Version of Works by Cecco Angiolieri
Cecco, As I Am and Was: The Poems ofCecco Angiolieri. Translated by Tracy Barrett. Boston: Branden Publishing Co., 1994.
A Work about Cecco Angiolieri
Alfie, Fabian. Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri’s Poetry and Late Medieval Society. Leeds, U.K.: Northern Universities Press, 2001.
