1. LATIN INFLUENCE.--During the early part of the Middle Ages Latin was the literary language of Italy, and the aim of the best writers of the time was to restore Roman culture. The Gothic kingdom of Ravenna, established by Theodoric, was the centre of this movement, under the influence of Cassiodorus, Boethius, and Symmachus. It was due to the prevailing affection for the memories of Rome, that through all the Dark Ages the Italian mind kept alive a spirit of freedom unknown in other countries of Europe, a spirit active, later, in the establishment of the Italian republics, and showing itself in the heroic resistance of the communes of Lombardy to the empire of the Hohenstaufens. While the literatures of other countries were drawn almost exclusively from sacred and chivalric legends, the Italians devoted themselves to the study of Roman law and history, to translations from the philosophers of Greece, and, above all, to the establishment of those great universities which were so powerful in extending science and culture throughout the Peninsula. While the Latin language was used in prose, the poets wrote in Provençal and in French, and many Italian troubadours appeared at the courts of Europe. 2. EARLY ITALIAN POETRY AND PROSE.--The French element became gradually lessened, and towards the close of the thirteenth century there arose the Tuscan school of lyric poetry, the true beginning of Italian art, of which Lapo Gianni, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Dante Alighieri were the masters. It is mainly inspired by love, and takes a popular courtly or scholastic form. The style of Gianni had many of the faults of his predecessors. That of Cavalcanti, the friend and precursor of Dante, showed a tendency to stifle poetic imagery under the dead weight of philosophy. But the love poems of Cino are so mellow, so sweet, so musical, that they are only surpassed by those of Dante, who, as the author of the "Vita Nuova," belongs to this lyric school. In this book he tells the story of his love for Beatrice, which was from the first a high idealization in which there was apparently nothing human or earthly. Everything is super-sensual, aerial, heavenly, and the real Beatrice melts more and more into the symbolic, passing out of her human nature into the divine. Italian prose writing is of a later date, and also succeeded a period when Italian authors wrote in Latin and French. It consists chiefly of chronicles, tales, and translations.