Dante sought his last refuge in Ravenna at the invitation of Count Guido Novello da Polenta (?-1320). According to Boccaccio, Guido was a person \u201cwell tutored in liberal studies\u201d who honored \u201cworthy men and especially those who exceeded others in knowledge.\u201d Dante served Guido in various important capacities, including possibly as professor of rhetoric. He died as a member of the count’s household, having just completed a crucial diplomatic mission to Venice on Ravenna\u2019s behalf. Guido organized a solemn funeral for Dante and had the poet buried in a classical sarcophagus in the local monastery of San Francesco.<\/p>\n
Dante chose Guido’s own aunt, Francesca da Rimini, as a major character in the Inferno<\/em>. Romantic-era critics saw Francesca as a doomed heroine, suffering because her love had violated arbitrary conventions and oppressive rules. I argue<\/a> (along with several modern critics) that she is supposed to be a real sinner. Dante has placed her in hell because she deserves her punishment for adultery, and besides, she doesn’t really love Paolo, whom she describes with a pastiche of slight misquotations taken from love poetry. She is a 14th-century Madame Bovary, in love with the literary concept of love, not with the individual man.<\/p>\n But back to Guido: Intriguingly, he wrote a minor poem that contains a striking phrase that Francesca also utters (almost verbatim) in her last lines to Dante in hell. Either Guido borrowed the phrase that was spoken by his own dead-and-damned aunt in Dante’s already-famous poem, or else Dante read Guido’s poem before he wrote the Inferno<\/em> and had Francesca quote it. Since almost everything else Francesca says in the Divine Comedy<\/em> is a slight misquotation, I am inclined to think the latter is true: Dante took a line from his friend’s naive ingenuous sonnet and assigned it to a sinner in hell.<\/p>\n