Dolce Stil Novo

The Dolce Stil Novo, or sweet new style, was a lyric poetry movement in thirteenth-century Italy, centered on Bologna and Florence, that transformed the courtly love tradition inherited from Provencal and Sicilian poets into a more philosophically refined, spiritually elevated treatment of love and the beloved. Its leading poets, Guido Guinizelli, widely credited as its founder, Guido Cavalcanti and, in his early work, Dante Alighieri, wrote in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, using a plain but musical style to link earthly love to divine grace and the beloved woman to an almost angelic intermediary between the poet and God. Dante himself named and celebrated the movement in his Purgatorio and drew directly on it in the Vita Nuova, and the Stil Novo's fusion of vernacular lyricism with philosophical seriousness is generally regarded as a foundational moment for the Italian literary language and for Dante's own mature poetics in the Divine Comedy.