ANGIOLIERI, CECCO. - Poet born in Siena around 1260, died between 1311 and 1313. The few biographical details concerning him are derived from his own Canzoniere. His father had held important offices in the commune of Siena, but Cecco was neither an exemplary man nor citizen, and was repeatedly fined, according to the custom of the time, for having arbitrarily deserted the army or for having been caught out after curfew. Before 1296 he left his city, for reasons we do not know precisely, and in 1303 he was certainly in Rome. There remains to us a Canzoniere of 150 sonnets (critical ed. by F. A. Massera, Bari 1920; new revised and updated ed. by L. Russo, ibid. 1940). The dominant note is cynicism, which, interpreted romantically by nineteenth-century criticism, today tends to be restricted too narrowly to the bounds of burlesque or mere convivial ostentation. Certainly the A. was not a profound soul, nor can one seek in him a human or religious drama. He was a weak soul, who abandoned himself to vice and a disorderly life, without having the strength to react and rise above II. Nevertheless, he possessed good imaginative gifts, revealed also in polemic and outburst, and which sometimes, as occurs in certain gnomic sonnets, enabled him to 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.