Tales of Angry Dante

Once upon a time, I used to hang around the biggest sourpuss in the world.

Grr! said the crabby ex-Florentine.

1)  One time Dante was traveling through Florence wearing armor to protect his throat and arm -- not surprising, because he was a soldier in his youth.  He saw a donkey driver transporting garbage, "who was going along behind the donkeys singing the book of Dante, and when he had sung for a bit, he hit the donkey and said 'Arri (Giddyup).'  Dante dealt him a forceful blow on the shoulder with his mailed fist, saying, 'I didn't put that Arri in there.'"

2)  When Dante was passing through the Porta San Piero, he "heard a blacksmith singing as he beat the iron on his anvil.  What he sang was from Dante, and he did it as if it were a (popular) ballad, jumbling the verses together, and mangling and altering them in a way that was a great offense to Dante.  He said nothing, however, but went into the blacksmith's shop" and started throwing his tools of the trade into the street: the hammer, the pincers, the scales.  The blacksmith cried, 'What the devil are you doing?'  Dante said, 'If you do not want to have me spoil your things, don't spoil mine.  You sing out of my book, but not as I wrote it; I have no other trade, and you spoil it.'  The blacksmith, vexed, gathered up his tools, and thereafter stuck to singing songs about Tristan and Lancelot. (Though I am sure the Tristan and Lancelot line is mere conjecture.)

This is a post brought to you by Procrastination: because the best way to deal with work is to ignore it.

1) from A Day in a Medieval City by Chiara Frugoni and Arsenio Frugoni
2) both stories are originally from Franco Sacchetti's Novelle.