• The Baptistery of the church of St. John in Florence; il mio bel San Giovanni , my beautiful St. John, as Dante calls it, Inferno XIX 17. ↩
• Of this ancestor of Dante, Cacciaguida, nothing is known but what the poet here tells us, and so clearly that it is not necessary to repeat it in prose. ↩
• Cacciaguida’s wife came from Ferrara in the Val di Pado, or Val di Po, the Valley of the Po. She was of the Aldighieri or Alighieri family, and from her Dante derived his surname. ↩
• The Emperor Conrad III of Swabia, uncle of Frederic Barbarossa. In 1143 he joined Louis VII of France in the Second Crusade, of which St. Bernard was the great preacher. He died in 1152, after his return from this crusade. ↩
• Cacciaguida was knighted by the Emperor Conrad. ↩
• The law or religion of Muhammad. ↩