• This has generally been supposed to be Sordello the Troubadour. But is it he? Is it Sordello the Troubadour, or Sordello the Podestà of Verona? or are they one and the same person? After much research, it is not easy to decide the question, and to “Single out Sordello, compassed murkily about With ravage of six long sad hundred years.” Yet as far as it is possible to learn it from various conflicting authorities, “Who will may hear Sordello’s story told.” Dante, in his treatise De Volgari Eloquio , I 15, speaks of Sordello of Mantua as “a man so choice in his language, that not only in his poems, but in whatever way he spoke, he abandoned the dialect of his province.” But here there is no question of the Provençal in which Sordello the Troubadour wrote, but only of Italian dialects in comparison with the universal and cultivated Italian, which Dante says “belongs to all the Italian cities, and seems to belong exclusively to none.” In the same treatise, II 13, he mentions a certain Gotto of Mantua as the author of many good songs; and this Gotto is supposed to be Sordello, as Sordello was born at Goïto in the province of Mantua. But would Dante in the same treatise allude to the same person under different names?