• Monna Cianghella della Tosa was a gay widow of Florence, who led such a life of pleasure that her name has passed into a proverb, or a common name for a dissolute woman. Lapo Salterello was a Florentine lawyer, and a man of dissipated habits; and Crescimbeni, whose mill grinds everything that comes to it, counts him among the poets, Volgar Poesia , III 82, and calls him a Rimatore di non poco grido , a rhymer of no little renown. Unluckily he quotes one of his sonnets. ↩
• Quinctius, surnamed Cincinnatus from his neglected locks, taken from his plough and made Dictator by the Roman Senate, and, after he had defeated the Volscians and saved the city, returning to his plough again. Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and mother of the Gracchi, who preferred for her husband a Roman citizen to a king, and boasted that her children were her only jewels. Shakespeare, Tit. Andron. , IV 1:⁠— “Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care Read to her sons, than she hath read to thee Sweet poetry, and Tally’s Orator.” ↩
• The Virgin Mary, invoked in the pains of childbirth, as mentioned Purgatorio XX 19:⁠— “And I by peradventure heard ‘Sweet Mary!’ Uttered in front of us amid the weeping, Even as a woman does who is in child-birth.” ↩