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ence: Le Monnier, 1884.
Angus GrahamALBERTINO MUSSATO (1261–1329)
Albertino, the greatest Latin poet of his age, was born
in Padua of lowly parentage. Orphaned at a young age,
he had the responsibility of caring for three younger
siblings—two brothers and a sister. (One of the brothers
would eventually become the abbot of Santa Giustina,
the great Benedictine monastery of Padua.) Early in
his life, Albertino earned money by copying books
for students at the university; later he became a notary
and the son-in-law of the powerful Guglielmo Lemici,
a very successful Paduan usurer. With the backing of
the Lemici clan and his own natural abilities, he played
a prominent role in Paduan public life, at home and
abroad, in peace and war, from around 1310 to his fi nal
exile in 1325, when the Carrara family fi nally broke the
infl uence of the Lemici. He died in exile in Chioggia
four years later.
But it was not Albertino’s successes as orator, states-
man, warrior, or diplomat of Padua that make his name
illustrious today. It is, rather, his remarkable achieve-ments as a man of letters in the context of a late medi-
eval Italian commune. Even before his emergence as a
fi gure in Paduan political life, Albertino had become a
member of a small group of scholars gathered around
Lovato de’ Lovati, an older Paduan judge. These men
studied the Latin poets as an avocation. The existence
of Carolingian manuscripts at the Capitular Library in
Verona, and in the Benedictine abbey of Pomposa near
Ravenna, made possible this learned diversion of the
cenacolo padovano (“Paduan circle”). The members of
the cenacolo were already familiar with the traditional
set of Latin poets, established earlier in the thirteenth
century—Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius—and
Lovato was the fi rst to take the next logical step, com-
posing original Latin poetry himself. Indeed, Petrarch
recalled his achievement.
Albertino, following in Lovato’s wake, composed
poems that helped to rehabilitate some forms of Latin
poetry. One example is his defense of such poetry
against the strictures of a Dominican, Fra Giovannino.
Another is his birthday elegy, in which he reviews his
life and the highlights of his career, including his laure-
ation. This may have been the fi rst work since antiquity
in which an author focused on his own day of birth for
refl ection and celebration.
In the 1320s, Albertino went to Siena in his capac-
ity as a diplomat and on the way, near Florence, fell ill.
The literary result of this illness was his poem Somnium
(“A Dream”), recounting his concept of the afterworld,
with particular attention to the nether regions. (Dante’s
Inferno was already in circulation at this time.)
Albertino also left us a bountiful harvest of Latin
prose works, especially contemporary histories of
Italy—De gestis Henrici VII Cesaris (The Deeds of
the Emperor Henry VII) and De gestis italicorum post
Henricum VII Cesarem (Italian Events after the Death
of Emperor Henry VII). However, for all his learning
and experience, his histories were no match for his
poetry, or for the historical text that was at the root of
Padua’s self-understanding: Rolandino’s Chronicles of
the Trevisan March.
Albertino also studied the tragedies of Seneca with
Lovato and composed introductions to the plays, as
well as an explanation of tragic meters for the younger
Marsilius of Padua, the author of Defensor pacis. In
1315, in imitation of Seneca and in connection with
local history. Albertino wrote his fi nest and most last-
ing work, Ecerinis (The Tragedy of Ecerinus), about the
tyrant Ezzelino III da Romano (1194–1259), the ruler
of Verona. Like some of his contemporaries, Albertino
saw an analogy between Ezzelino and the current lord of
Verona, Cangrande della Scala. Albertino was familiar
with the details of Ezzelino’s career from Rolandino’s
Chronicles, which stressed the heroic, united, Catholic
character of Paduan resistance. This was the storyALBERTANUS OF BRESCIA