Reggio Emilia

City in which Ludovico Ariosto was born 8^th September 1474, the son of Count Niccolò Ariosto and Daria Malaguzzi Valeri; where the father, a Bolognese, had moved to serve the House of Este and was commander of the citadel. From Reggio instead came his mother and all his Malaguzzi relatives. Ludovico lived there till 1481, year in which the family moved to Rovigo. As an adult, the poet returned to Reggio several times to stay with relatives, as he did 1501-1503, after accepting the post of commander of Canossa castle, and he regularly stayed in the villa of his cousin Sigismondo Malaguzzi, in the vicinity of Reggio Emilia (see, on this, vv. 118-123 of the Satire IV dedicated to the villa of the Order of Saint Maurice, two kilometres from Reggio). He stayed in Reggio in the summer of 1503 and returned to the city in the summer of 1507. We know he was again in Reggio in October-November 1510, as he sent dispatches to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. In March 1517 he again went through this city in the Po Valley. Lastly, there are documents that indicate his presence there in the summer of 1521, during a visit to his cousin Annibale Malaguzzi. Ludovico is rightly also considered to be a ‘son of Reggio’, as well as Ferrara, as many of his forefathers and relatives lived in Reggio: his grandfather Rinaldo Ariosto, who was Podestà from 1432 to 1440, his brother Gabriele, baptised in Reggio in 1477, his numerous nephews and nieces, down to Beatrice Ariosto, a late descendant of the poet. Another link that ties Reggio Emilia to Ludovico is Matteo Maria Boiardo, the renowned author of the Orlando Innamorato, a member of a noble family from Reggio that will have certainly had contact with Niccolò Ariosto. It is said, although it is unlikely, that Boiardo died in the same room in the Palazzo del Capitano della Cittadella where Ludovico, the man who wrote the sequel to his chivalrous romance had been born twenty years before.