PIETRO da EBOLI. - Poet of the second half of the 12th century.
He is the author of a trilogy in verse modelled on Virgil and Ovid, in which a politico-religious conception of the Empire is advocated (unus augustus..., unus sol, unus pastor, una fides), which was to receive fuller development in Dante’s De monarchia. In the poem Liber ad honorem Augusti (1195), also called De rebus Siculis carmen (edited by E. Rota, in RIS, XXXI, p. 1 ff.), he denounces Norman policy and extols Swabian policy, in particular the exploits of Enrico VI and the figure of the Empress Costanza; in a second, lost poem, Gesta Federici, he celebrated Barbarossa; in De balneis Puteolanis, in epigrams of six distichs each (the work is also known in various vernacular renderings; V. E. Percopo, Napoli 1887 e M. Pelaez, in Studi romanzi, 19 [1928], pp. 47-134), he praises the benefits of the thirty-five springs of Pozzuoli.