FIORE, IL

FIORE, IL. - An allegorical-didactic poem of 232 sonnets in Italian vernacular, from the 14th century. It has been preserved only in codex H 438 of the Library of the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier.

The author of the F. states that his name is Durante, which has led to the poem being repeatedly attributed to Dante Alighieri: the question is not currently resolved entirely in the negative, but it is certain that the F. cannot be separated from another poem, the Detto d'amore. Both are reworkings of the Roman de la Rose, with more emphasis on depicting the gallant life of the time than on defining the theological and religious questions that occupied so much of the French poem. Both edited by E. G. Parodi (Florence 1922). The Detto d'amore had been discovered by G. Morpurgo in a codex of the Laurentian Library, no. 1234, published in the Programma (I, f. 1, Bologna 1881, pp. 18-61).

Bibl.: C. Mazzoni, Se possa il F. esservi di Dante Alighieri, in Raccolta D'Ancona, Florence 1901, pp. 697-702; E. Percepan, Il F. di Ruscò di Filippo, in Rassegna critica della letteratura, no. 12 (1907), pp. 49-54; L. F. Benedetto, Il Roman di Ruscò e la letteratura italiana, Halle 1910; M. Barbi, La questione del F., in Studi danteschi, III, Florence 1921, pp. 134-135; E. D'Ovidio, Se possa il F. essere di Dante Alighieri, in Nuovi studi danteschi, Naples 1912, pp. 253-86; M. D. Ramacciotti, The syntax of F. and of Dante's Inferno as evidence in the question of the authorship of F., Washington 1936; G. Patronio, Introduzione al F., in Cultura neolatina, S. (1948), pp. 47-54.