FIORE, IL. - An allegorical-didactic poem of 232 sonnets in the Italian vernacular, from the fourteenth century. It has been preserved only in manuscript H 438 of the Library of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier.
The author of the F. says that his name is Durante, which has repeatedly led to the attribution of the poem to Alighieri: the question has not at present been entirely resolved in the negative sense, but it is certain that the F. cannot be separated from another short poem, the Detto d'amore. Both are reworkings of the Roman de la Rose, aimed rather at depicting the gallant life of the time than at defining the theological and religious questions that occupied so large a part of the French poem. Both edited by E. G. Parodi (Florence 1922). The Detto d'amore had been discovered by G. Morpurgo in a Laurentian manuscript, no. 1234, published in the Propugnatore (I, f. 1, Bologna 1881, pp. 18-61).