Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

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Signoria, four times Gonfalonier, tliat is, the Chief Magistrate of the
Republic, and a Decemvir in 1370 (the very year of a revival of popular
liberty in Lucca, after fifty-six years of servitude through the prevalence of
the Ghibelline party) ; while his father, Alessandro,'^ Seems to be remem-
bered only as a physician. The probabihty, therefore, is that what led to
the original settlement of the family in Lucca was no ambition to assert a
prescriptive right, but was rather the new sense of widening opportunity,
for the improvement of one's condition and culture, which then animated
Italian city-life, and was destined, under the favoring circumstances of the
age, to bring upon the theatre of history all those names which have added
most to the glory of Italy in art and learning.
The year 1300, indeed, is memorable not only as marking an important
political and social crisis, but as a noteworthy epoch in the history of
Italian architecture, painting and poetry. From 1294 to 1300, the year
in which he died, Arnolfo was directing the construction of the Santa
Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral-church of Florence, of which the dome
was afterwards completed by Brunelleschi. About the year 1300 Andrea
Pisano was at work on his gates of the Baptistery of Pisa. Giotto, too,
was passing from his shepherd-life, to carry into the art of painting a new
inspiration derived from communion with simple nature. That same year
was also the time when Dante, in imagination, wended his way through
the regions of the dead, transferring thither friendships and loves, together
with enmities and bitter judgments, of earth, in his impassioned descrip-
tions of purifying pains, hopeless agonies and seraphic bliss. Evidently,
the age was pre-eminent for intellectual movement ;
and it is not a little
interesting to associate with this movement, as we so naturally may, the
coming in of our Diodatis to take part in the city-life of Lucca. For they
were, in generations to come, not only there but in foreign lands, by their
public services, literary, professional, civil, military and diplomatic, in
eminent positions in State and Church, and largely on the side of liberty
and truth, to prove themselves an eminently active and potent race.
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