Guido Cavalcanti

Guido Cavalcanti (between 1250 and 1259 – August 1300) was an Italian poet and troubadour, as well as an intellectual influence on his best friend, Dante Alighieri.

Cavalcanti was born in Florence at a time when the comune was beginning its economic, political, intellectual and artistic ascendancy as one of the leading cities of the Renaissance. The disunited Italian peninsula was dominated by a political particularism that pitted city-states against one another, often with this factionalism contributing to the fractious and sometimes violent political environments of each comune. The domination of medieval religious interpretations of reality, morality and society were challenged by a rise of a new urban culture across Europe that gradually supplanted rural, local, ecclesiastical and feudal ways of thinking. There was an accompanying return to study, and to interpretation and emulation of the classics, known as a revival of antiquity. New secular and humanistic views laid the foundations for modern life in Western Civilization. As Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss historian and author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy wrote, "It was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people which achieved the conquest of the western world." In sum, Cavalcanti lived during and helped shape this time of great innovation that was spurred on by a desire to explore, create and experiment with new things.

Cavalcanti was the son of Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph whom Dante condemns to torment in the sixth circle of his Inferno, where the heretics are punished. Unlike Dante, Guido was an atheist. As Giovanni Boccaccio (Decameron, VI, 9) wrote during the generation after Cavalcanti's death, "Si diceva tralla gente volgare che queste sue speculazioni erano solo in cercare se trovar si potesse che Iddio non-fosse" (People commonly said his speculations were only in trying to find that God did not exist).

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