Therefore I excuse myself to himself, who perhaps looks down from heaven with a disdainful eye on me writing.”

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The following account of the Guelfs and Ghibellines is from the Pecorone of Giovanni Fiorentino, a writer of the fourteenth century. It forms the first Novella of the Eighth Day, and will be found in Roscoe’s Italian Novelists , I 322:⁠—