The claims that his real name was Gervasio (Gervase), that he belonged to the Mainardi family, and that he was for a time a canon in Ravenna, are doubtless products of somewhat approximate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholarship.
Yet in 1308 Riccobaldo can be found in Ferrara, swearing fidelity to the Church of Rome immediately after the expulsion of the Este family from the lordship of the city.
Only recently has it been possible to attribute to him a political "carmen" (song) in Latin which celebrates the newly acquired freedom of his city, Ferrara.
In this text there are obvious citations of various earlier Latin lyrics, a fact that shows a considerable personal culture for the period.
Among the numerous works he knew were the dictionary Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum of Papias, the short Chronicon of Saint Isidore of Seville (attributed by Riccobaldo to a bishop Miletus; then some decades of Livy’s ‘’Ab Urbe Condita" (History of Rome); the Historiae adversus paganos (Histories against the Pagans) of Paulus Orosius, the great encyclopedic work by Marziano Capella entitled Itinerarium Antonini, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (Natural History), the Collectanea rerum memorabilium (Collection of Curiosities) of Solinus, the work of compilation by the Dominican Martin of Opava, which Riccobaldo cites as the Martiniana, parts of the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) by Jacobus de Voragine, the version of Eutropius drawn up by Paul the Deacon and the Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards), the abbreviated version of the Philippic Histories of Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus or Pompey Trogue composed by Justin, Florus, the Pharsalia of Lucan, something of the writings of Seneca the Younger (certainly including the De consolatione ad Helviam and De clementia (On Clemency), Suetonius’s Vitae Caesarum (Lives of the Twelve Caesars), the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (The Sea Voyage of St Brendan), Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid, works of Pomponius Mela, the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (Historia Caroli Magni, the Historia scholastica by Peter Comestor (a biblical paraphrase written in Latin), Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), Juvenal, the Latin translation by Rufinus of Aquileia of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Agnellus of Ravenna.
We can add the Distichs of Cato (Catonis Disticha), Einhard, Hegesippus, Horace, certain texts to be found in the so-called Spicilegium Ravennatis historiae; Virgil, perhaps the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, and the manuscripts of the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, without excluding others still.
In any case, there is no overlooking Riccobaldo nowadays as a figure of first rank in the history of Italian culture, despite his having been neglected even in relatively recent times by historians who were otherwise not without merit.