• Tegghiajo Aldobrandi was a distinguished citizen of Florence, and opposed what Malespini calls “the ill counsel of the people,” that war should be declared against the Sienese, which war resulted in the battle of Monte Aperto and the defeat of the Florentines. ↩
• Jacopo Rusticucci was a rich Florentine gentleman, whose chief misfortune seems to have been an ill-assorted marriage. Whereupon the amiable Boccaccio in his usual Decameron style remarks:⁠— “Men ought not then to be overhasty in getting married; on the contrary, they should come to it with much precaution.” And then he indulges in five octavo pages against matrimony and woman in general. ↩
• See Macchiavelli’s story of “Belfagor,” wherein Minos and Rhadamanthus, and the rest of the infernal judges, are greatly surprised to hear an infinite number of condemned souls “lament nothing so bitterly as their folly in having taken wives, attributing to them the whole of their misfortune.” ↩