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Updated: June 27, 2025
Violence, indeed, did end it, and with humiliating detail. One day I sold my cloak to buy a book. That was a vellum-bound copy of the Sonnets of Cino of Pistoja, which, with my autograph, "Fr. Strelleius Pistoriae IV Kal. Aug. MDCCXXII," I still possess in my present retreat at Lucca.
Ricciarda or Selvaggia, as Cino calls her was the daughter of a noble family of Pistoja, her father having been gonfaniere and leader of the Bianchi faction, and it appears that she also was famed for her poetic gifts. For a time she and Cino kept their love a secret from the world, but their poems to each other at this time show it to have been upon a high plane.
Following Via Cavour, past Palazzo Panciatichi-Cellesi, through Via Francesco Magni, into Piazza del Duomo, you are in the midst of all that was most splendid in Pistoja of old: the Duomo, with its old fortified tower, Torre del Potest
I could not be indignant with her; there was that underlying her hardy speech which forbade precipitate judgment. "My child," I said, "what do you mean to do?" She shrugged her thin shoulders. "It is misery at home. Here, in Pistoja, there is not apparent misery, nor need there be any. Signer Francesco," she said, "look at me.
And if we consider the Renaissance sculpture, its complexity is so great, its individuality is so pronounced, that one is apt to lose sight of the important part which style really plays in it. In a work by Donatello we see first of all his thought; in a Madonna of Mino's it is the idea that charms us; the Delia Robbia frieze at Pistoja is pure genre.
All the poets were not as constant as their own lines would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino da Pistoja for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge, and declares he cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim."
Beyond, nestling in the hollows of the Apennines, shutting in the plain of that side, is ancient Lombard-walled Pistoja the key to the passes of Northern Italy. Farther on, nearer Florence, rise the heights of Monte Catni, crowned as with a diadem by a small burgh untouched since the middle ages. Nearer at hand, glittering like steel in the sunshine, is the lake of Bientina.
What uncertainty can there be regarding her life, when Cino da Pistoja wrote his most celebrated poem, a canzone to Dante, consoling him for her loss? The following stanza from Rossetti's matchless version is proof enough for all who care to read: "Why now do pangs of torment clutch thy heart, Which with thy love should make thee overjoyed, As him whose intellect has passed the skies?
But she hated the priests, though she would never tell me the reason, and could hardly ever be drawn to confession again. It had been the fortress of a great old family in the Middle Ages, that of the Vergiolesi, from whom sprang the beautiful Selvaggia, beloved by Cino of Pistoja.
Not content with thus winning Pistoja, he thought to control the city of Rome also, which he did in the name of the Emperor, the Pope being in Avignon; and this done, he went through the city with two devices embroidered on his coat: the one before read, "He is as pleaseth God," and that behind, "And shall be what God will have him."
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