To Ferrara Tasso went with a blithe heart.

Inclination, the custom of his country, the necessities of that poet's vocation for which he had abandoned a profession, poverty and ambition, vanity and the delights of life, combined to lure him to his ruin.
He found Ferrara far more magnificent than Urbino.

Pageants, hunting parties, theatrical entertainments, assumed fantastic forms of splendor in this capital, which no other city of Italy, except Florence and Venice upon rare occasions, rivaled.

For a long while past Ferrara had been the center of a semi-feudal, semi-humanistic culture, out of which the Masque and Drama, music and painting, scholarship and poetry, emerged with brilliant originality, blending mediaeval and antique elements in a specific type of modern romance.

This culminated in the permanent and monumental work began by Boiardo in the morning, and completed by Ariosto in the meridian of the Renaissance.