Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti, a respected intellectual and poet of the “dolce stil nuovo,” is a friend of and influence on Dante.

He gains great renown for his doctrinal ode on love, “Donna me prega.” The approximately fifty poems ascribed to Cavalcanti are fascinating in their beauty, drama, and pathos.

Active in Florentine politics as a leader of the White Guelph faction in Florence, he is exiled because of the hostility between the White and Black factions.

Stricken with malaria, he soon returns in late 1299 to Florence, where he will die at fifty on August 29 of the following year.

The Frescobaldi family, beginning from an early economic base in the Italian community of cloth merchants in Bruges, had expanded their banking interests to their home city of Florence in the thirteenth century.

Their power base in the city's affairs lies in their participation in the small network that controls the great cloth-working Arti: the Arte della Lana, the Arte di Calimala, the guild of cloth finishers and merchants in foreign cloth, and the Cambio, or money exchange.