La Vita Nuova

It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse.

Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love—transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor.

[3] La Vita Nuova contains 42 brief chapters (31 for Guglielmo Gorni) with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; one canzone is left unfinished, interrupted by the death of Beatrice Portinari, Dante's lifelong love.

[4] The poems present a frame story, recounting Dante's love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when both were nine years old) all the way to his mourning after her death, and his determination to write of her "that which has never been written of any woman."

Dante's unusual approach to his piece — drawing upon personal events and experience, addressing the readers, and writing in Italian rather than Latin — marked a turning point in European poetry, when many writers abandoned highly stylized forms of writing for a simpler style.

Dicendo: "Or pensa pur di farmi onore"; E 'n ciascuna parola sua ridia.

E poco stando meco il mio segnore, Guardando in quella parte onde venia,

A modified version of the opening line of the work's Introduction was used on the television show Star Trek: Voyager in the episode "Latent Image" (1999).

The author Allegra Goodman wrote a short story entitled "La Vita Nuova", published in the May 3, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, in which Dante's words (in English) are interspersed throughout the piece.