Divina Commedia

Gianni Schicchi comes from some thirty lines of Inferno, canto XXX, where Dante finds Schicchi among the falsifiers of persons, damned for having impersonated the dead Buoso Donati in order to dictate a will in his own favour. The poem reports the crime and no more than that, too little for a libretto, so Forzano took the story itself from a fourteenth-century Florentine commentary on these very lines. Dante finished the Commedia shortly before his death in 1321.