Matteo Maria Boiardo

Matteo Maria Boiardo put Roland in love and left the poem unfinished when the French invaded. He was a count of Scandiano, a nobleman in the service of the Este at Ferrara, and governed Modena and then Reggio for them - a working administrator who wrote in the evenings. The Orlando Innamorato was the result, and its joke is in the title: the Roland of the French chansons de geste is a figure of grim Christian duty, and Boiardo makes him fall hopelessly in love with Angelica, a princess from Cathay who leads him and half of Charlemagne's court across Asia after her. He fused the two great cycles - the Carolingian matter of war and the Arthurian matter of love and enchantment - and the combination is what Italian romance epic then was. He wrote it in ottava rima for a court that heard it read aloud, and invented the trick of breaking off at the interesting moment to start another thread. Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494 and he abandoned the poem in the middle of a stanza, apologising to his readers that Italy was on fire. He died that December. Ariosto picked the story up where he had left it and wrote Orlando Furioso, which begins mid-scene where the Innamorato stops. It eclipsed him so thoroughly that for three centuries he was read mainly in a rewritten Tuscan version by Berni, his own Emilian original being thought too rough for polite readers. The original was restored in the nineteenth century, and Angelica, Rodomonte and the enchanted garden are all his inventions rather than Ariosto's.

• Lived: 1441 CE – 1494 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: poet