_SORDELLO_ The period in which the poem of _Sordello_ opens is at the end of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, at the time when the Guelf cities allied themselves against the Ghibellines in Northern Italy.

They formed the Lombard League, and took their private quarrels up into one great quarrel--that between the partisans of the Empire and those of the Pope.

Sordello is then a young man of thirty years.

He was born in 1194, when the fierce fight in the streets of Vicenza took place which Salinguerra describes, as he looks back on his life, in the fourth canto of this poem.

The child is saved in that battle, and brought from Vicenza by Adelaide, the second wife of Ezzelino da Romano II.,[8] to Goito.