Va, Canzonetta mia, E saluta Messere, Dilli lo mal ch'i' aggio. Quella che m'ha in balia Si distretto mi tene, Ch'eo viver non poraggio. Salutami Toscana, Quella ched è sovrana, In cui regna tutta cortesia; E vanne in Puglia piana, La magna Capitana, Là dove è lo mio core notte e dia.
These lines sound a farewell to the old age and a salutation to the new. Enzo's heart is in the lowlands of Apulia and the great Capitanate, where his father built castles and fought mighty wars. He belongs, like his verses, like his race, like the chivalrous sentiments he had imbibed in youth, to the past; and now he is dreaming life away, a captive with the burghers of Bologna. Yet it is Tuscany for which he reserves the epithet of Sovereign--Tuscany where all courtesy holds sway. The situation is pathetic. The poem is a prophecy.
Raimond of Tours, one of the earlier French minnesingers, bade his friend seek hospitality "in the noble city of the Florentines, named Florence; for it is there that joy and song and love are perfected with beauty crowned."[49] The delicate living and graceful pastimes of Valdarno were famous throughout Europe. In the old French romance of "Cléomadés," for example, we read a rhymed description of the games and banquets with which Florence welcomed May and June[50]:--
Pour May et Gayn honorer; Le May pour sa jolivité, Et le Gayn pour la planté.
Villani, writing of the year 1283, when the Guelfs had triumphed and the nobles had been quelled, speaks thus of those festivities[51]:--"In this happy and fair state of ease and peaceful quiet so wealth-giving to merchants and artificers, and specially to the Guelfs, who ruled the land, there was formed in the quarter of S. Felicità beyond the Arno, where the family De' Rossi took the lead, together with their neighborhood, a company or band of one thousand men and upwards, all attired in white, with a Lord named the Lord of Love. This band had no other purpose than to pass the time in games and solace, and in dances of ladies, knights and other people of the city, roaming the town with trumpets and divers instruments of music, in joy and gladness, and abiding together in banquets at mid-day and eventide." From another chronicle it appears that this company was called the _Brigata bianca_, or _Brigata amorosa_.[52] "There," says a rhymer who had seen the sports, "might one behold the rich attire of silk and gold, of samite, white and blue and violet, with fair velvets; and trappings of all colors I beheld that day. The young men mid the women went with gaze fixed upon those eyes angelical, that turn the midnight into noon. Over their blonde tresses the maidens wore gems and precious garlands; lilies, violets and roses were their charming faces. You would not have said: 'Yon are mortal beings.' They rather seemed a thousand paradises."[53]