«Cecco Angiolieri was born full of hatred in Siena, on the very same day as Dante Alighieri in Florence.»¹ So begins Marcel Schwob’s brief biographical sketch of Cecco Angiolieri, contained in his Vite immaginarie, a work of 1896. The value of these few pages is to be sought not so much in the quantity of information they yield, the sources drawn upon are in fact few (the principal one being the 1892 anthology Dante and his Circle with the Italian Poets Preceding him, edited by the Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti), as in the quality of the portrait they offer us. Schwob is clear and incisive from the outset: Cecco Angiolieri was not simply born in the Sienese commune; he «was born full of hatred in Siena». It is at the very least significant that the Symbolist writer should immediately stress the poet’s rancorous nature, a trait perhaps dear to him in that it can be found also in certain poètes maudits, along with poverty and the pose of the «wretch» (as Alessandro d’Ancona, the first to publish, in 1874, a monograph² devoted to the poet, likes to call him, almost with affection). But beyond the motives that drive Schwob’s interest in the Sienese poet, what matters for us lies in how the poet is perceived, and perceived in an extremely direct and pointed manner in the concision of that opening. The informative swiftness with which we make our first contact with Cecco Angiolieri reveals the sharp perception one has of him, then as now. Indeed, once he has been situated in time and space (however debatable the exact day and year of his birth may be), we are at once furnished, as a biographical datum of equal importance, with the most salient feature of the poet’s psychological, and by reflection also artistic, profile: his spiteful and resentful character. And it is well to bear in mind this bent of his towards violence and brawling, both physical (one thinks of his involvement in a brawl attested in Sienese archival documents, the Libri di Biccherna³, datable to 1291) and verbal (witness the tenzone with Dante Alighieri and sonnet CX, Dante Alighier, s’i’ so’ buon begolardo⁴, addressed to him) whenever one wishes to speak of Cecco Angiolieri. But however relevant this characteristic, one might cautiously call it “negative”, it is equally important to take great care not to enclose the figure entirely within a bubble of hatred, ending by identifying him solely as the emblem of real and poetic spite. Cecco Angiolieri was able to be something else as well, and above all he was human, and as such was bound to the most strictly earthly themes, such as laughter and mockery. Yet from time to time he was also capable, not without shame, of reaching towards something else, such as weeping. An irascible character, we have said; a fragile one, we must add. «He is a wretch who weeps,» d’Ancona suggests in the 1874 essay already cited, «and even if he is himself the chief author of his own troubles, we feel ourselves to be men, and, as men, moved by his misfortunes; when, beneath the lash of a hostile fate, driven into abjection by the red-hot nails of bad company, of want of money and of guilty love, we still see him joking and laughing, at the very moment when a tear of sorrow, and perhaps of shame, falls from his lashes, we too, if we have a heart, while our lips are shaped into a smile by his witticisms, in the depths of our heart deplore so fair a flower of talent and youth, withered by the deadly cravings of hatred […] all the more since a squalid life, and its pleasures, and its tedium, soon perhaps dragged him to the grave».⁵ A poet, then, capable of generating empathy in the reader, of drawing him emotionally into his private life and into his reality, as harsh as it is human. A reality in which an honest reader cannot but recognise himself, if not entirely, then at least in some traits. One must therefore necessarily take account of all the facets that make up the overall picture of a poet too often anchored to mere earthly reality: from his psychological features to the milieux he seems to have habitually frequented, from the style that may be labelled “comic-realist” to that silent and shamefully hidden inclination towards feeling.

This must be borne in mind, indeed it must certainly be taken into account, yet with care. For the perception of Schwob and of d’Ancona, a modern and Romantic perception, and one too often akin to our own point of view as well, is not entirely accurate. How much of his poetic output can actually be traced back to his life? What if his literature were nothing but fiction and refuge? What if the spiteful poet was in reality a cultivated man and a man of letters? It is with such questions that criticism must proceed in dealing with Cecco Angiolieri, and not only with him: we ought to approach any author whatsoever in the hope of restoring a picture as little distorted as possible by an “emotional” reading. One must move rather in the direction of objectivity, an objectivity that must set aside contemporary sensibility, the modern reader’s vice of adapting literature to the tastes of his own age. For Cecco Angiolieri was a spiteful poet, but not only that: it is the biographical fact that will change our perspective.

Cecco Angiolieri was born into a noble Guelph family of Siena around 1260. His mother, Lisa de’ Salimbeni, belonged to the highest Sienese aristocracy; his father, Angioliero degli Angiolieri, was a model father, one might say: he twice held the office of lord of the Commune and entered the order of the Knights of St Mary. This is the cultural context in which the young Cecco Angiolieri grew up, immersed from birth in Sienese high society. Among the few biographical details we possess about Angiolieri, this is certainly an interesting one if we consider his future choices in life, and in poetry too (the comic realism, the gambling, the tavern, the money and the women he sang of in his verse seem to jar with his elevated family background). It becomes more interesting still if one chooses to compare the Sienese poet’s social standing with that of certain poets belonging to the opposing poetic movement, the Stilnovo. One should not, however, be surprised to discover that Cecco di Messer Angioliero Angiolieri, comic-realist poet, was at birth wealthy and of good family, as much as, if not more than, the Florentine Stilnovist poets. He did not therefore lack the means of access to study and education: he was acquainted with Provençal, Sicilian, Siculo-Tuscan and Stilnovist poetry before ever coming into contact with the goliardic poetry of medieval Latin and becoming one of the initiators of comic-realist poetry in Tuscany. He was thus a cultivated man, a fact to be borne in mind when one wishes to speak of his poetic output, this man who chose to sing the praises of the tavern and its vices.

It is enough, indeed, to recall that Cecco di Messer Angioliero Angiolieri had the opportunity of access to education and study in order to understand how, in approaching this new literature, he proceeded with literary seriousness, cultural commitment and stylistic awareness. No naïf, then, this man who gathered within himself (being acquainted, as we have said, even with Stilnovist poetry) the goliardic poetic mode, aware of the rhetorical training of its authors and conscious of his own. He draws on the far older anti-feminist and misogynist motifs revived by the clerici vagantes, without disdaining to make the newer ones his own: woman, the tavern, the die, poverty, money (peculiarly resonant Angiolieran words, expressed in the well-known sonnet Tre cose solamente mi so’ in in grado⁶). And he draws on them by inheriting not only their contents but also their attitudes, both stylistic and moral, reviving in a middle style certain of their modes of expression which, in their irreverence and sensuality, could not but exert a great fascination upon him.

In the study of Angiolieri the man, however, one must deliberately exclude the data relating to his passion for gambling, or to his relations with his father, or again to those with his beloved Becchina: these are pseudo-biographical data that we trace solely within his poetic output. Data less properly biographical and more properly literary, inferable from the verse and certainly coloured by the poet’s psychological inclination. This position is taken also by virtue of what Maurizio Vitale states in Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, with which one fully agrees: «All that has further been written by certain critics who have taken as historical fact the representation Cecco gives of himself in his verse (his ardent inclination to gambling and gluttony, his earthly, violent and unhappy love for Becchina, his extreme poverty, his cruel conflicts with his father) has […] the support of no concretely historical element, and that representation remains merely the expression of Angiolieri’s poetic personality, which certainly must be explained, and must be explained with an indispensable reference to the human and earthly experience of the versifier, an experience that his art has deformed and exaggerated, casting it in the modes of the playful tradition, but certainly not annulled nor, perhaps, falsified in what is essential».⁷

This is the keystone for tracing an overall interpretation of Angiolieri, as well as a fundamental interpretive tool for examining any author whatsoever. It is this, rather than the poet’s emotionality (which may be kept in mind but which, alas, is not historical fact), and rather than modern and forced interpretations, that we must treasure. It is essential, in the course of the discussion surrounding the figure of Cecco Angiolieri (and, as has been specified, of anyone), to be very careful not to superimpose historical fact upon poetic fact in a forced manner, in order to read into it what we should like to read. That is, we ought to avoid obsessively searching the few biographical data for something capable of reassuring us, of confirming to us that Angiolieri was exactly as Schwob described him: a damned soul and a man of the tavern. This must be repeated many times, as many as prove necessary, at the risk of seeming exasperating and disagreeable to those who have always seen Cecco as a “bohemian”. Let no one take offence: this need not necessarily mean that Cecco Angiolieri could not have experienced what is recounted in the poetry. It will mean, rather, that the Sienese poet’s poetic ends, and the means suited to achieving them, must carry more weight in the study of the versifier than whatever, in life, he actually did that resembled the poetry.

It is worth clarifying a point that is certainly reaffirmed, if implicitly, in our poet’s output: the poetry of Cecco Angiolieri is not properly of the common people, even though its addressee might appear “popular”, since it is governed by rhetoric. The middle style, and the contents it expresses, certainly set it in antithesis and in competition, indeed, let us say, in conflict, with poetry of the high style. But let it not be said (it cannot be, and one would hardly find any foothold for it) that this is a choice dictated by a lack of rhetorical or cultural means (his social background should be kept in mind). It is rather a literary stance, one that carries with it the conscious responsibility of having set out along a little-trodden path, that guides his stylistic and poetic choices. It is an original vision of the world that Cecco Angiolieri, in his striving after laughter and jest and in his desire to test new ground, means to put forward, even while inserting himself into an evocative tradition, as though to claim its authority for his own. Within this line of thought one must justify, if there were ever any need, any attitude that might be labelled blasphemous, and the seemingly plebeian yet always bold and varied lexicon. In the need to penetrate the humblest aspects of life there emerges an impatience with the metaphysical, the abstract or the impalpable, and a love for the concrete, the earthly or, in the sense pertinent to this context, the “realistic”. Just as the “angel-woman” regains physicality in the “comic female”, so Cecco feels the weight of creation and finds himself unwittingly idealising it, in a last-ditch attempt to root himself in the earth and to sing its humble, profane protagonists. In the words of Mario Marti (Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante) let us sum up and fix the concepts just expressed, recalling that «if courtly love is a literary idealisation, profane love is no less so, and that Cecco’s importance […] lies above all in having bestowed upon a nascent literature its playful tones, adapting to the lexicon, the syntax and the style of the new literary language a training that in turn derived precisely from culture, from tradition».⁸

Some forty years had passed since the death of Cecco Angiolieri when Giovanni Boccaccio chose to recall him. And here he is, recounted in the Decameron (the fourth tale of the ninth day)⁹ through the mouth of Neifile: a man defrauded, deceived, stripped of his own cunning, cheated by his hapless companion in misadventure, one Cecco di Fortarrigo. A man, in short, who appears wholly inadequate to represent the poetry of which he made himself the singer. Man only, not poet. But in the course of this brief piece we have tried to present a different Cecco, to convince ourselves, and to convince the reader, that Cecco Angiolieri was man, poet and man of letters. Reluctantly we have had to abandon the idea of an avant-la-lettre poète maudit. Reluctantly, I say, because one acknowledges how intriguing the idea is and how fascinating a figure of that kind, but the biographical documents cannot allow us to advance so alluring a hypothesis. We cannot let ourselves be led astray by a personal modern sensibility of our own, a sensibility that was not his, that did not belong to him. Conversely, we have been able to understand that he was a man of culture, a man of letters in every respect. He studied, and had occasion to prove it in his poetic output, the poetry of a man who had the good intuition to look all around himself and behind himself, reworking the models that suited him while knowing, all the same, those he chose to discard. And from these two considerations we have learned an equally important piece of information, fitting for this context but to be treasured in approaching any author of any age: a man’s life does not coincide with that man’s poetry. At times the two may overlap; in some cases the one may certainly influence the other; but the two things must never be made to coincide, as though they were one and the same. Rather, one should separate the two in order to examine them distinctly, and reunite them in order then to obtain an overall picture of the figure both as man and as poet, but never let the one condition the other and lead us down the wrong road: we should commit errors of principle, approaching the literary work already conditioned by the man’s life, or, conversely, going minutely in search of how much of the literature can be traced in his life, forcing a reading that would no longer be critical and that would neglect what concrete material we do have for tracing an honest study: the sources. And if the sources on Angiolieri’s life were very few, we fortunately have a great deal of his output from which we may read and profit. And the examination of the themes that guided Cecco, of the models he chose not to forget, of the style he deemed fitting for the rendering of such motifs, all have as their aim the restoring of a personal vision of the world, a perception all his own and original, one that is not identified in a one-to-one manner with the life he led in that world, not, at any rate, from the information we possess.

All the reasoning we have pursued turns upon a single aim: to demonstrate the literary dignity and worth of Cecco Angiolieri’s output, taking into account, of the man as well as of the poet, solely and exclusively the objective biographical data, and excluding any “fictionalised” version of the figure.
The considerations regarding Angiolieri can, however, be extended to any author one chooses to tackle, from antiquity to the modern and the contemporary age (where, clearly, historical and biographical data are necessarily more readily available). The same critical attitude is required, for example, to understand fully the output of authors, to cite some in whom life and work are closely interconnected, such as Sandro Penna or Pier Paolo Pasolini, or again Charles Baudelaire or Jane Austen. In their case the biographical fact is fundamental to understanding their literary output, but an emotional, moral, polemical or political consideration would risk distorting their words, causing the reader not to interpret the meanings, the expressions, the poetry, but rather to adapt them to his own tastes, his own sensibility, his own age.

The method, however effective, is not simple to apply: to be honest with literature one must first be honest with oneself. That is, one must transcend one’s own experience of the world, as well as one’s own morality, dictated by the cultural context in which one lives, in order to project oneself critically and objectively into a dimension that is not necessarily, indeed, is only with difficulty, one’s own. And even were one to study a writer of one’s own time, of one’s own historical and cultural sphere, it would still be necessary to reassess and rethink one’s own time, and to transcend one’s own tastes, one’s own (and most personal) likes and dislikes, one’s own ideals and motives (subjective by definition), everything, in short, that might in some way risk clouding a more lucid and honest vision of reality. The vice of veiling one’s eyes, or veiling them in part, so as to read what one would expect to read, is the murder of literatures and philosophies, and the murder of critical thought as well. The written word is to be respected, not distorted to suit one’s pleasure. Only on such premises will it be possible to read and understand a passage of Nietzsche, or of Kundera, or of Kafka. Only, that is, by taking into account the literature, the thought and the man that produced it, yet without ever superimposing them in a forced manner and rendering them back in forms that are not harmonious, still less honest. Let it be men and literatures that speak of themselves, not we.

Luca Peverini is a student on the master’s degree course in Italian, Classical and European History Studies, with a specialisation in Italian Literature and Philology, at the University of Perugia. He holds a degree in Modern Literature with a thesis entitled “Cecco Angiolieri. A comic-realist perspective in the century of the Stilnovo”. He has also produced a short dissertation on Mimesis, the study by the philologist Erich Auerbach, entitled “Understanding the concept of realism intuitively”.