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GUIDO CAVALCANTI would be memorable if only for his youthful friendship with Dante, celebrated in many poems of both, and more especially in the sonnet, so well known in England from Shelley’s more poetical than accurate version, in which Dante wishes for his company, along with Lapo Gianni and their respective ladies, on a voyage with him and his Beatrice. Vanna, Cavalcanti’s lady-love in those days, is mentioned in another sonnet as the chosen companion of Beatrice:

Each Beside the other seemed a thing divine.

Cavalcanti had the reputation of a free-thinker, and the charge seems hardly refuted by his having made a pilgrimage to Compostella, even if he ever arrived there, which may be questioned. It is supposed to have been on this journey that he made the acquaintance of the pretty Mandetta of Toulouse, the theme of much of his verse. He was a leading personage in the Florentine republic, and his strifes with inimical factions eventually led to his exile to Sarzana, where he contracted a disease which carried him off after his return to his native city.