CINO da PISTOIA. - C. de’ Sighibuldi, born about 1270, studied grammar in his native city and law at Bologna and in France; he was a jurist and judge at Pistoia, Florence, and in the March of Ancona, and professor at the Universities of Siena, Perugia, and Naples. Often absent from his native city, whether for reasons of study or for political reasons (he was banished in 1303–1306 and supported the enterprise of Arrigo VII from 1310), he spent his last four years there amid offices and honours, and died there at the end of 1336 or the beginning of 1337.
There remain by him a Lectura in codicem and an In Digestum vetus, many Additiones, several Consiliu; a Quaestio, and many lyric poems, of correspondence, politics (on the death of Arrigo VII), and love, especially for Selvaggia Vergiolesi. In law he preferred the dialectical method to that of the glossators; he adapted the law to the needs of his time; and he professed himself a supporter of civil authority and of the imperial idea. In poetry, although amid a mass of traditional motifs and devices, through his solitary reveries concerning the beloved who was distant or lost, and through his taste for a sorrow that becomes sweet even in its bitterness, he marks the transition between the «stil novo» and Petrarca.