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At that same hour the astronomer Donati was sweeping the heavens with his telescope at the Florentine observatory, and it may have been ten days later that he discovered in the handle of the Dipper the great comet which will always bear his name, the most magnificent comet of modern times, only excepting that of 1680, which could be seen at noonday.
His love for Lucrezia Donati, in whose honour the tournament of 1467 was popularly supposed to be held, though in reality it was given to celebrate his betrothal with Clarice Orsini, seems to have been merely an affectation in the manner of Petrarch, so fashionable at that time.
This grieved the Donati widow exceedingly; but she hoped, with her daughter's beauty, to disturb the arrangement before the celebration of the marriage; and from an upper apartment, seeing Buondelmonti approach her house alone, she descended, and as he was passing she said to him, "I am glad to learn you have chosen a wife, although I had reserved my daughter for you;" and, pushing the door open, presented her to his view.
The children that might have been mine are better unborn, since I could not give them a mother whom I loved. You remind me that Dante married Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, and she bore him seven children. Yet, Herbert, was this wife not mentioned in the "Commedia," nor in "La Vita Nuova," nor anywhere else in his writings. Dante was a Conformist.
Let it suffice to mention the teaching profession, which fails to attract in any considerable numbers the right kind of men and women. True there are a few "prizes" in the profession, and to some of the rude donati the Church holds out a helping hand; but the lay members cannot look forward even to the "congenial gloom of a Colonial Bishopric."
Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name.
It received on one day, in this vestibule of the exposition, the Labrador from France and the Donati from Brazil. Dom Pedro's coffee, sugar and tobacco and the marbles and canvases of the Société des Beaux-Arts were whisked off in amicable companionship to their final destination. The solidarity of the nations is in some sort promoted by this shaking down together of their goods and chattels.
The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters.
The feuds of Neri and Bianchi at this time distracted Florence; at the head of the Blacks, though somewhat their enemy, was Corso Donati; at the head of the Whites were the Cerchi and the Cavalcanti.
But the evil fortune of the city, and the defective nature of her laws, gave rise to enmities between the family of the Albizzi and that of the Ricci, which divided her citizens as completely as those of the Buondelmonti and the Uberti, or the Donati and the Cerchi had formerly done.
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