Poesia giocoso (realistic, or comic, verse) was a complete contrast to serious love poetry. The language was often deliberately unrefined, colloquial, and sometimes scurrilous, in keeping with the themes dealt with in the poetry. This kind of verse belongs to an ongoing European tradition, owing something to the satirical goliard poets of the 12th and 13th centuries, who wrote Latin verses in praise of pleasure or in vituperation of their personal enemies, of women, or of the Roman Catholic Church. Though the personae they affect are often crude, even violent, the comic poets—whose usual verse form was the sonnet—were cultivated literary men and not the proletarian rebels that they were thought to be by Romantic critics. The earliest of them was Rustico di Filippo, who produced both courtly love poetry and coarse, sometimes obscene verse of the “realistic” kind. The best-known and most versatile was Cecco Angiolieri, whose down-to-earth mistress Becchina was a parody of the ethereal women of the stil novo and whose favourite subject was his father’s meanness. Folgore di San Gimignano is often classified among these poets for convenience’s sake. He is best known for his elegant sonnet cycles listing the aristocratic pleasures (reminiscent of the Provençal plazer) associated, for example, with the different months of the year. Far more conventional are the paradoxical negative responses (reminiscent of the Provençal enueg) of Cenne della Chitarra. Dante himself exchanged insults in this coarse combative style with his contemporary Forese Donati.

Religious poetry

The famous Laudes creaturarum o Cantico di Frate Sole (c. 1225; “Canticle of Brother Sun”), of St. Francis of Assisi was one of the earliest Italian poems. It was written in rhythmical prose that recalls the verses of the Bible and uses assonance in place of rhyme. In the Umbrian dialect, God is praised through all the things of his creation. It is probable that St. Francis also composed a musical accompaniment, and after his death the lauda became a common form of religious song used by the confraternities of laypeople who gathered on holy days to sing the praises of God and the saints and to recall the life and Passion of Christ. The one real poet of the lauda tradition was Jacopone da Todi, a Franciscan and a mystic. His laudi, in the form of ballads, were often concerned with the themes of spiritual poverty and the corruption of the church. His most intense composition (“Donna de Paradiso”) is a dialogue between the mother of Christ and a messenger who graphically describes Christ’s Passion and death.

In northern Italy religious poetry was mainly moralistic and pervaded by a pessimism rooted in heretical ideas derived from Manichaeism, which saw the world and the body as being evil and under Satan’s control. The Milanese Bonvesin de la Riva, whose Libro delle tre scritture (1274; “Book of the Three Scriptures”) anticipates Dante, and the Franciscan from Verona, Giacomino da Verona, author of De Jerusalem celesti (c. 1250; “On the Heavenly Jerusalem”) and De Babilonia civitate infernali (c. 1250; “On the Infernal City of Babylon”), were the liveliest and most imaginative of this group.

Prose

Literary vernacular prose began in the 13th century, though Latin continued to be used for writings on theology, philosophy, law, politics, and science.

The founder of Italian artistic prose style, the Bolognese professor of rhetoric Guido Faba, illustrated his teaching with examples adapted from Latin. Guittone, his most-notable follower in epistolography, tended toward an ornate style replete with elaborate rhetorical and metrical figures. In contrast with Guittone’s style is the clear scientific prose of Ristoro d’Arezzo’s Della composizione del mondo (1282; “On the Composition of the World”) and the simple narrative style of the Florentine collection of anecdotal tales distantly foreshadowing Boccaccio’s Decameron, Il novellino (written in the late 13th century, but not published until 1525, with the title Le ciento novelle antike [“A Hundred Old Tales”; Eng. trans. Il Novellino: The Hundred Old Tales]). The masterpiece of 13th-century prose is Dante’s Vita nuova. Though not yet completely at ease in vernacular prose, Dante combined simplicity with great delicacy and a poetic power that derived from the mysterious depths underlying certain key words.

Dante (1265–1321)

Dante Alighieri is one of the most important and influential names in all of European literature, but it was only after his exile from his native Florence at age 37 (1302) that he set out to write his more ambitious works. Il convivio (c. 1304–07; The Banquet), revealing his detailed knowledge of Scholastic philosophy, is, though incomplete, the first great example of a treatise in vernacular prose; its language avoids the ingenuousness of popular writers and the artificiality of the translators from Latin. De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1304–07; “Concerning Vernacular Eloquence”; Eng. trans. Literature in the Vernacular), written about the same time but in Latin, contains the first theoretical discussion and definition of the Italian literary language. Both these works remained unfinished. In a later doctrinal work, also in Latin, De monarchia (written c. 1313; On Monarchy), Dante expounded his political theories, which demanded the coordination of the two medieval powers, pope and emperor.

Dante’s genius found its fullest development in his Commedia (written c. 1308–21; The Divine Comedy), an allegorical poem—though after the first canto the allegory is only occasionally obtrusive—in terza rima, mini-stanzas of three lines each, called terzine, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, and so on. The middle line of each terzina rhymes with the two outside rhymes of the next, creating a continuous metrical chain. It is the literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest products of the creative human mind. The individual cantos vary in length between 115 and 160 lines, with most lying somewhere in the middle. The total number of lines is 14,233.

The central allegory of the poem is essentially medieval, taking the form of a journey through the worlds beyond the grave with, as guides, the Roman poet Virgil and the lady of Dante’s La vita nuova (c. 1293; Eng. trans. Vita nuova or The New Life), Beatrice, who symbolize reason and faith, respectively. The poem is divided into three cantiche, or narrative sections: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each section contains 33 cantos, though the Inferno has one more (34), since the very first canto serves as a prologue to the entire work. Dante, through his experiences and encounters on the journey, gains understanding of the gradations of damnation, expiation, and beatitude, and the climax of the poem is his momentary vision of God. The greatness of the poem lies in its complex imaginative power of construction, inexhaustible wealth of poetry, and continuing significance of spiritual meanings. Thanks largely to the extraordinary influence of Petrarch—a very different sort of poet and a denigrator of everything medieval, including Dante’s works—Dante’s reputation suffered a 400-year eclipse after enjoying immediate popularity in the 14th century. It was revived in the Romantic period, and Dante’s work continues to challenge translators and to influence modern poets both inside and outside Italy.