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Updated: June 21, 2025
After having heard and read, "the Gascon, overcome with joy," says the contemporary historian Villani, "threw himself at the king's feet, saying, 'My lord, now know I that thou art my best friend, and that thou wouldest render me good for evil.
"I think," said Rienzi, "to have often heard, that thou art an orphan?" "True, my Lord; the old Augustine nun who reared my boyhood, has told me again and again that my parents are dead. Both noble, my Lord; but I am the child of shame. And I say it often, and think of it ever, in order to make Angelo Villani remember that he has a name to win."
Presently there came a pause in the conversation, and Villani, after gazing intently upon his companion, observed: "How much you have altered since I first saw you, Teresa. I suppose it is partly owing to your natural progress from childhood to womanhood-why, you must be nineteen?" "Just twenty."
The poorer population had been almost utterly destroyed by the plague; so that these funds were for the most part wasted, misapplied, and preyed upon by mal-administrators. The foundation of the University of Florence is also mentioned as one of the extraordinary consequences of this calamity. Matteo Villani expressly excepts the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which seems to have been well managed.
Struck by the universal glory of that great name, he lamented his own fortune to be occupied by the obscure details of merchandise; already he sighed to emulate the fame of the Roman, and as Villani tells us, from that day he abandoned for ever the occupations of commerce, dedicating himself to literature.
History dictated under the inspiration of pedantic scholarship, and with the object of reproducing an obsolete style, by men of letters who had played no prominent part in the Commonwealth, cannot pretend to the vigor and the freshness that we admire so much in the writings of men like the Villani, Gino Capponi, Giovanni Cavalcanti, and many others.
So he learned Latin with the man who had taught Dante, and Dante was admitted to be the most learned man of his times, and he ground the colours and washed the brushes for Cimabue, and drew under the master's eye everything that he saw, and became, as the chronicler Villani says of him, 'the most sovereign master of painting to be found in his time, and the one who most of all others took all figures and all action from nature. And Villani was his contemporary, and knew him when he was growing old, and recorded his death and his splendid funeral.
"The Preaching Friars and the Friars Minor likewise," says Villani, "through envy or some other cause, would put no faith in that image, whereby they fell into great infamy with the people.
Giovanni Villani says more than once, 'No constellation can subjugate either the free will of man, or the counsels of God. Matteo Villani declares astrology to be a vice which the Florentines had inherited, along with other superstitions, from their pagan ancestors, the Romans.
Villani had exacted a promise from Teresa, that she would not permit an introduction to him, and shortly after left the city for a few weeks. Teresa felt relieved by his absence, although they were no longer enemies, and her mode of life was unchanged. Nearly a fortnight had elapsed, when another incident occurred that changed the whole future of her life.
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