During Leonora d’Este’s visit to Padua in 1561, Tasso met Lucrezia Bendidio, a young girl of fifteen from a noble family of Ferrara, at the time in the retinue of the Este princess. He saw her again in Ferrara in the summer of 1562. In the space of a few weeks, a love story emerged, but was devoid of any real development since in 1562 Lucrezia married Count Paolo Machiavelli. Tasso dedicated a long series of lyrical poems to her, tracing all the stages of a love affair, from falling in love to separation, in a deliberate literary mode (neither should it be forgotten that Lucrezia was the love object in Ben divino, Giovan Battista Pigna’s collected lyric poetry). Many years later, was organizing his love poems (the collection in ms. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi L VIII 302), he used the lyrics for Lucrezia as the opening poems (T. Tasso, Rime, , first part, tome I, edited by F. Gavazzeni and V. Martignone, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004). Shortly after this, in the summer of 1563, during a journey to Mantua, he met Laura Peperara, from a Mantua family, and fell in love. This love story was also without any real development, but resulted in a series of lyrical poems composed over a longer period of time (many years later, in 1583, Tasso also wrote lines celebrating her marriage). From this point on, Tasso’s love life and emotional bonds become a mystery, if not altogether nonexistent, obscured by his literary focus.