ANGIOLIERI, CECCO. - Poet b. in Siena around 1260, d. between 1311 and 1313. The few biographical notices about him are drawn from his own Canzoniere. His father had held important offices in the commune of Siena, but Cecco was neither an exemplary man nor an exemplary citizen, and he was several times fined, according to the custom of the times, for having arbitrarily abandoned the army or for having been caught wandering about after curfew. Before 1296 he left his city, we do not know exactly for what reason, and in 1303 he was certainly in Rome. There remains to us from him a Canzoniere of 150 sonnets (critical ed. edited by F. A. Massera, Bari 1920; new ed. revised and updated, edited by L. Russo, ibid. 1940). The dominant note is cynicism, which, interpreted romantically by nineteenth-century criticism, tends today to be too narrowly confined within the limits of the burlesque or of pure convivial display. Certainly the A. was not a profound soul, nor can one look in him for a human or religious drama. He was a weak soul, who let himself go into vice and a disorderly life, without having the strength to react and to rise above it. Nevertheless he had good imaginative qualities, which are revealed also in polemic and in outburst, and which sometimes, as happens in certain gnomic sonnets, make him attain a singular expressive power.
BIBL. A. D'Ancona, Studi di critica e di storia letteraria, I. Bologna 1912, pp. 163-275; L. Russo, C. A. e la critica in Problemi di metodo critico, Bari 1929; G. Montagna, La poesia di C. A., Pavia 1933; T. Grossi, C. A. ed i burleschi del '200 e 300, Torino 1936.