Lodovico Ariosto

Italian · 1474 to 1533

Born on September 8, 1474, in Reggio nell'Emilia, then within the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, Ludovico Ariosto was the eldest of ten children of Niccolo Ariosto, commander of the citadel, and Daria Malaguzzi Valeri. His father pressed him into five years of law, which he abandoned for Greek and Latin under the humanist Gregorio da Spoleto, an education cut short when his tutor left for France. When Niccolo died in 1500, the responsibility for his younger siblings fell to him, and he took up paid service to support them. He entered the orbit of the Este court in Ferrara, first under Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, who valued the poet so little that when shown the finished poem he is said to have asked where Ariosto had found so many stories. He wrote early comedies for the court stage, Cassaria (1508) and I suppositi (1509), and a sequence of bitter, conversational Satires modeled on Horace. His life's work was Orlando Furioso, a vast chivalric romance continuing the unfinished Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo. He published it in forty cantos in 1516, revised and reissued it in 1521, and brought out the final version of forty-six cantos in 1532, the year before he died. After leaving Ippolito he served Duke Alfonso, undertook a diplomatic mission to Pope Julius II, and spent three difficult years governing the bandit-ridden mountain province of the Garfagnana. He returned to Ferrara, married Alessandra Benucci in secret, and managed the ducal theater. He died in Ferrara on July 6, 1533, at the age of fifty-eight, leaving behind the poem he had polished for nearly thirty years.