FRANCO SACCHETTI. — Poet, born perhaps in Ragusa around 1330, died around 1400. His name appears among those of the most ancient and illustrious families in the canto of nobility in Florence, the 16th of the *Paradiso*; but their social standing had by then declined, and Franco di Benci’s life was spent amid the varied and often dramatic vicissitudes of politics in his homeland, mercantile pursuits, and travels throughout much of Europe, as well as public offices in cities such as Bibbiena, San Miniato, and Faenza.
A man of stern reflection, wide reading, and lively curiosity, as culture was being organized into philological humanism and already deriving from the poetics of the great fourteenth-century writers the principles of vulgar classicism, he withdrew from the commitments—and also the abstractions—of the new literati, devoting himself instead to two seemingly opposed directions: the straightforward and often austere piety of the *Sposizioni di Vangeli* [Expositions on the Gospels], and the severe morality evident in his *Lettere* [Letters] (though in every work of his, at times, the face of a bitter and merciless moralist emerges, one who sees all too clearly the decline of civic life and morals); and the inexhaustible festivity of a varied and picturesque reality, ever shifting in its scattered and joyful tumult of gestures, from which, however, he does not abandon himself. Rather, he seems to observe it from a certain distance, as if recalling it; and it is the play of a memory continually amused and continually surprised by circumstance, the most persistent theme of the *Trecentonovelle*.
One senses clearly that he is in crisis between the religious synthesis offered to his living and thinking by a richly participated and meditated Christianity, and the dispersive appearance into which reality shatters and dissipates. Urban culture was the most striking fruit of Christian civilization, and Franciscanism had taught Italy the wonder of a life that is animated by the wholly spiritual and reconciled to a loving God, creator of a benign nature: the synthesis between divine truth and reality, which is a joyful occasion for a spiritual rediscovery, seems to be dissolving again in Sacchetti. He thus strives to establish a relationship that may reconnect, in a formally flawless artistic crystallization, the unity of life and the multiplicity of reality. It is from this intention that his ballads, madrigals, and *cacce* [hunting songs] in the *Rime* [Rhymes] derive their light and prestige.
Sacchetti attempts a limited yet highly original formal solution to his inner conflict, seeking the harmony of a dance and music that enchant and suspend the fleeting reality. That urban life is arrested, assumes a modest guise, and is condensed into rhythm. Even Franciscan spirituality had made use of traditional choreographic forms, composed of words, music, and dance, to illustrate the soul’s journey to God; but the *Rime* of Sacchetti—and even his novellas, which when read through the lens of the *Rime* reveal how readily he turns to formal solutions—break off that lofty movement of which Dante had been the greatest poet, and limit themselves to re-examining a reality circumscribed in itself, harmonious within narrow bounds, often onomatopoeic, yet in the grace of poetic encounter not forgetful of the gift by which spiritual life lends to the profane some of its purest cadences.