Fiammetta. Paradise (The I Tatti Renaissance Library)

Ugolino Verino (1438–1516) was among the principal Latin poets in the Florence of Lorenzo de’Medici. A student of Cristoforo Landino, whose youthful love poems Verino imitated, Verino was a leading figure in the Renaissance revival of ancient Latin elegy. He blended Propertius, Ovid’s Amores, and elements of Petrarch’s lyric style to forge a distinctive poetic voice in a three-book cycle of poems in honor of his lady-love, Fiammetta. His Paradise, by contrast, is a vision-poem indebted to Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante, and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, in which Ugolino is taken on a tour of Heaven and the afterlife by the recently deceased Cosimo de’Medici.