Cino da Pistoia

CINO da PISTOIA. - C. de' Sighibuldi, b. around 1270, studied grammar in his homeland and law in Bologna and in France; he was a jurist and judge in Pistoia, in Florence, in the March of Ancona, and a professor at the University of Siena, of Perugia, of Naples; often far from his homeland either for reasons of study or for political reasons (he was banished in 1303-1306 and from 1310 favored the enterprise of Henry VII), he spent his last four years there amid offices and honors and died there at the end of 1336 or in the early days of 1337.

There remain of his a Lectura in codicem and an In Digestum vetus, many Additiones, some Consilia; a Quaestio, and many lyrics, of correspondence, of politics (on the death of Henry VII), of love, and in particular for Selvaggia Vergiolesi. In law he preferred the dialectical method to that of the glossators; he adapted the law to the needs of the times; and he declared himself a supporter of civil power and of the imperial idea. In poetry, even amid the congeries of traditional motifs and artifices, through the solitary longings for the beloved far away or lost and through the taste for a sorrow that becomes sweet even in its bitterness, he marks the transition between the «stil novo» and Petrarch.