Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti

Guido Cavalcanti's father and his father-in-law, Farinati degli Uberti, were heads of feuding factions in Florence, whose differences were conciliated in part through the marriage of Guido to Beatrice degli Uberti. Dante made high poetry of these characters in his grand portrayals of Guido's father and father-in-law in the Inferno. With his spiritualization of chivalric love, analyzing its psychological depths, Guido Cavalcanti brought to the emergent Italian literary language the last of the important elements necessary for the inspired use Dante would make of it in his Divine Comedy. For example, most of Cavalcanti's love songs were addressed to the French woman Mandetta in a role that Beatrice would later play in Dante's poetry. The English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti first translated Cavalcanti in 1861.