Cavalcanti, GUIDO

Cavalcanti, GUIDO, Italian poet, born in 1230, was banished, for mercantile transactions with a Guelph, by the Ghibellines, a daughter of one of whose chiefs he had married, and returned in broken health to Florence only to die there, about 1300. His works—sonnets, ballads, and canzoni—are remarkable alike from their language and depth of thought, although his epicurean philosophy gained him, among his contemporaries, the reputation of an atheist. See Ercole, Guido Cavalcanti e le sue Rime (Milan, 1885).—Another of the name, BARTOLOMMEO (1503–62), a noble and eloquent Florentine, led a revolt against the Medici, and was afterwards employed by Pope Paul III.