It was, therefore, natural that Italians should imitate the troubadours whose art proved so successful at Italian courts and some thirty Italian troubadours are known to us. Count Manfred II. and Albert, the Marquis of Malaspina, engaged in _tensos_ with Peire Vidal and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras respectively and are the first Italians known to have written in Provençal. Genoa produced a number of Italian troubadours of whom the best were Lanfranc Cigala and Bonifacio Calvo. The latter was a wanderer and spent some time in Castile at the court of Alfonso X. Lanfranc Cigala was a judge in his native town: from him survive a _sirventes_ against Bonifacio III. of Montferrat who had abandoned the cause of Frederick II., crusade poems and a _sirventes_ against the obscure style. The Venetian Bartolomeo Zorzi was a prisoner at Genoa from 1266 to 1273, having been captured by the Genoese. The troubadour of Genoa, Bonifacio Calvo, had written a vigorous invective against Venice, to which the captive troubadour composed an equally strong reply addressed [101] to Bonifacio Calvo; the latter sought him out and the two troubadours became friends. The most famous, however, of the Italian troubadours is certainly Sordello. There is much uncertainty concerning the facts of Sordello's life; he was born at Goito, near Mantua, and was of noble family. His name is not to be derived from _sordidus_, but from _Surdus_, a not uncommon patronymic in North Italy during the thirteenth century. Of his early years nothing is known: at some period of his youth he entered the court of Count Ricciardo di san Bonifazio, the lord of Verona, where he fell in love with his master's wife, Cunizza da Romano (Dante, _Par._ ix. 32), and eloped with her. The details of this affair are entirely obscure; according to some commentators, it was the final outcome of a family feud, while others assert that the elopement took place with the connivance of Cunizza's brother, the notorious Ezzelino III. (_Inf_. xii. 110): the date is approximately 1225. At any rate, Sordello and Cunizza betook themselves to Ezzelino's court. Then, according to the Provençal biography, follows his secret marriage with Otta, and his flight from Treviso, to escape the vengeance of her angry relatives. He thus left Italy about the year 1229, and retired to the South of France, where he visited the courts of Provence, Toulouse, Roussillon, [102] penetrating also into Castile. A chief authority for these wanderings is the troubadour Peire Bremen Ricas Novas, whose _sirventes_ speaks of him as being in Spain at the court of the king of Leon: this was Alfonso IX., who died in the year 1230. He also visited Portugal, but for this no date can be assigned. Allusions in his poems show that he was in Provence before 1235: about ten years later we find him at the court of the Countess Beatrice (_Par._ vi. 133), daughter of Raimon Berengar, Count of Provence, and wife of Charles I. of Anjou. Beatrice may have