Sigismondo Malaguzzi

Ariosto’s cousin, son of Valerio Malaguzzi and brother of Annibale, from Reggio, is the dedicatory of Satire IV, written on the first anniversary of Ariosto’s sojourn in Garfagnana (20 February 1523), the desolate and wild region where the poet had been obliged to go for Alfonso I and which had distanced him from his poetry. In this context the memory of time past at the villa of  Valerio Malaguzzi’s sons, near Reggio, known as villa del Mauriziano, was set in contrast to the labyrinth-like and painful present of Castelnuovo in Garfagnana. In Satire IV, vv. 118-120, the poet indeed wrote: “Il tuo Mauricïan sempre vagheggio, / la bella stanza, il Rodano vicino, / da le Naiade amato ombroso seggio”. Ariosto spent holidays in the villa del Mauriziano, together with his cousin Sigismondo, at least twice: around1496-1497 and in the summer of 1503. It was Sigismondo who had an ‘antique garden’ built at the villa, along the lines of the open-air museums then being built in Rome. In 1522 Sigismondo Malaguzzi brought to the Mauriziano a Roman cippus with inscription, that had been found at San Maurizio on land of his, and which was placed to mark the start to the itinerary inside the ‘antique garden’. Sigismondo certainly lived in Ferrara in 1504, probably whilst studying law. His presence in the city is documented by a confessio, in which he declares to have received from the notary Bartolomeo di Sandalo 68 gold ducats to be used in the trading of silk, business that the Malaguzzi brothers (Annibale and Sigismondo, but also Giulio and Anton Maria) did in Reggio Emilia. Between1519 and 1522 Sigismondo was Podestà at Carpi, where his brother Annibale met his future wife Lucrezia Pio.

Il Mauriziano (engraving 1800), from M. Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto ricostruita su nuovi documenti/Life of Ludovico Ariosto ..., vol. I, Geneva, L. Olschki, 1930-1931, p. 175