Ritmo di Sant'Alessio

In the eleventh century his legend, based on the Latin version, was versified in Old French as the Vie de Saint Alexis.

The Ritmo was conserved in a manuscript of the Benedictine convent of Santa Vittoria in Matenano near Fermo, a daughter house of the Abbey of Farfa.

51, c. 130 f. According to Bruno Migliorini, the poet also hailed from the Marche, and according to its first editor, Gianfranco Contini, the Ritmo is composed in "a koiné of East Central Italy, whose cultural capital was undoubtedly Montecassino."

It has thus many affinities with the Ritmo cassinese: written about the same time (broadly) in the same region, metrically and linguistically similar, Benedictine in religion, and both monastic in provenance and giullaresco in style, designed for popular audience and public performance.

Each stanza opens with four to thirteen monorhyming octonaries or novenaries and closes with a deca- or hendecasyllabic couplet of a different rhyme, often rich or homonymic.