• Monte San Giuliano, between Pisa and Lucca. Shelley, Poems , III 166:⁠— “It was that hill whose intervening brow Screens Lucca from the Pisan’s envious eye, Which the circumfluous plain waving below, Like a wide lake of green fertility, With streams and fields and marshes bare, Divides from the far Apennine, which lie Islanded in the immeasurable air.” ↩
• The hounds are the Pisan mob; the hunters, the Pisan noblemen here mentioned; the wolf and whelps, Ugolino and his sons. ↩
• It is a question whether in this line chiavar is to be rendered nailed up or locked . Villani and Benvenuto say the tower was locked, and the keys thrown into the Arno; and I believe most of the commentators interpret the line in this way. But the locking of a prison door, which must have been a daily occurrence, could hardly have caused the dismay here portrayed, unless it can be shown that the lower door of the tower was usually left unlocked. “The thirty lines from Ed io senti’ are unequalled,” says Landor, Pentameron , 40, “by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions of poetry.” ↩
• Italy; it being an old custom to call countries by the affirmative particle of the language. ↩