Dante da Maiano

Who is Dante da Maiano?

Dante da Maiano was a late thirteenth-century poet who composed mainly sonnets in Italian and Occitan. He was an older contemporary of Dante Alighieri and active in Florence.

He may have been a Provençal- or Auvergnat-speaker from Maillane, but more probably he was from the Tuscan village of Maiano near Fiesole. In 1882 Adolfo Borgognoni argued that he was an invention of Renaissance philology, but met with the opposition of F. Novati in 1883 and Giovanni Bertacchi in 1896. Bertacchi argued that Dante da Maiano was the same person as the Dante Magalante, son of ser Ugo da Maiano, who appears in a public record of 1301. At the time this Dante was living in San Benedetto and was requested in mundualdum by a relative of his, Lapa, widow of Vanni di Chello Davizzi, to be her tutor. That a Dante da Maiano existed during the lifetime of Dante Alighieri and that he was capable of "tutoring" was thus established, but the identification with the poet could not be made certain. Santorre Debenedetti finally disproved Borgognoni's thesis in 1907. He discovered two Occitan sonnets ascribed to Dante da Maiano in a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript conserved in the Biblioteca Laurentiana, Florence.