Filippo Villani, in his “Lives of Illustrious Florentines,” says that the Bishop of Florence, a grasping, covetous man, instituted a lawsuit against Arrighetto, in order to deprive him of his benefice, which he wished to bestow upon one of his own relatives.
The first two books are full of general complaints of his misfortunes, of his poverty, but especially of his being pointed at by the finger of scorn: Gentibus opprobrium sum, crebraque fabula vulgi;Dedecus agnoscit tota platea meum.Me digito monstrant; subsannant dentibus omnes,Ut monstrum monstror dedecorosus ego.But amidst the poet’s lamentations there is no clue as to the cause of his misfortunes—nothing to confirm Villani’s account.
On the contrary, there is a passage in which the poet addresses the Bishop of Florence in terms of affectionate respect: Inclyte, cui vivo, si vivo, provide PræsulFlorentine, statum scito benigne meum.And after saying that he had reached the utmost point of calamity, he thus concludes his address: Vivus et extinctus te semper amabo, sed essetViventis melior quam morientis amor.Tiraboschi comments upon the discrepancy between these expressions of the poet and Villani’s statement of the injury done to him by the bishop, and he seems inclined to reject Villani’s account.
Arrighetto was writing his poem about 1192, or soon after, for he alludes to two events which had happened in that year as facts of recent occurrence, namely, the assassination of the King of Jerusalem Conrad of Montferrat, and the imprisonment of Richard I of England by Leopold of Austria.
The account of Filippo Villani, a countryman of Arrighetto, living at no very great distance of time, and a writer evidently well informed of the internal history of his country, need not be hastily rejected.
In a manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan he is styled “Henricus Samariensis, Versilogus, Doctor Grammaticus.” Some biographers have confounded Arrighetto with Arrigo Simintendi of Prato who lived much later, and who translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Italian.