...s nothing escaped them, so there is nothing that was not photographed upon his sensitive brain, to be afterward fixed forever in the Commedia. What Florence was during his youth and manhood, with its Guelph s and Ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its kaleidoscopic revolutions, all parties loving liberty and doing their best to destroy her, as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our ...