UGUCCIONE da LODI. — A soldier and man of letters who lived between the last decades of the 12th century and the early decades of the 13th, born perhaps in Cremona, from a Lodi family; he may have belonged to the Waldensian sect or to that of the “Lombard Poor.”
He wrote in Venetian vernacular a short poem: *Il libro sulla creazione del mondo, la morte, l'inferno, il paradiso, i vizi umani, specie superbia e avarizia*. The book is divided into two parts: the first in monorhymed strophes of dodecasyllabic and hendecasyllabic lines; the second (also called *Istoria*) in octonary couplets with alternating rhyme. The first part, amid so much sermonizing, contains an interesting confession by the author: as long as he was “vigorous, strong, more valiant than Orlando,” he took no heed of God, indeed he says: “I was fierce and combative against Thee”; when he became “old and grey,” he turned to penitence. The second part freely adapts French didactic-religious poems. Other works are attributed to U., in which many verses from the *Libro* recur, namely: *La contemplazione della morte*; *Del piangolante nasimento dell'omo* (a reworking of the *De contemptu mundi*); *L'Avento dell'Anticristo*, modeled on the *Epistola de Assone* and the *Ludus paschalis de Antechristo* (1161), but with new touches in the central section. U.’s rhymes, steeped in the apocalyptic climate of the late 12th century, possess, despite their prolixity, a rough power. Pietro d'A Bergagapé and Giacomo di Verona inserted verses by U. into their own poems.