Italian Arthurian Literature

Summary

In his well-known sonnet, ‘Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io’, Dante Alighieri speaks of his desire to be swept away, as it were, on a small boat with his two friends, Guido Cavalcanti and Lapo Gianni, and in the company of their three ladies:

Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io

fossimo presi per incantamento,

e messi in un vasel ch’ad ogni vento

per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio.

sì che fortuna od altro tempo rio

non ci potesse dare impedimento,

anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento,

di stare insieme crescesse ‘l disio.

E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi

con quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta

con noi ponesse il buono incantatore:

e quivi ragionar sempre d’amore,

e ciascuna di lor fosse contenta,

sì come i’ credo che saremmo noi.

[Guido, my wish would be that you and Lapo and I might be taken by a magic spell and placed on a boat that would be blown about the sea as you and I would wish, such that neither storm nor any other foul weather could impede our course; indeed, by sharing one same desire, our wish to be together would be increased. And may the good magician put with us Lady Vanna and Lady Lagia and that woman who rests on number thirty: and there we would always speak of love, and each of our ladies would be as joyful as I think we, too, would be.]

They would share this lovely idyll with their three female friends: Cavalcanti's monna Vanna, Lapo's monna Lagia, and the unidentified lady who is apparently the one listed as number thirty in the list of the sixty most beautiful women of Florence, provided in the sirventese to which Dante refers in the Vita Nuova, but which unfortunately does not survive. In this wonderfully evocative sonnet, Dante also mentions the ‘buono incantatore’ who would be responsible for making sure that the ladies were mysteriously and miraculously transported to their vasel, thus transforming their mundane world into a sort of ‘fantasy island’ or at least a romantic cruise.