N. 21. - Inscription and coat of arms to commemorate the houses of the ELISEI N. 3 Via degli Speziali. This locality corresponds to the mouth of Vicolo della Coroncina, which was bounded on this side by the houses of the Elisei, that extended towards Piazza del Mercato Vecchio (Piazza Vittorio Emanuele):
Reading edition
Gli antichi miei ed io nacqui nel loco, Dove si trova l’ultimo sesto Da quel che corre il vostro annual giuoco. DANTE, Paradiso, XVI, 40–42. My ancestors and I our birthplace had Where first is found the last ward of the city By him who runneth in your annual game. Longfellow’s translation.
Cacciaguida’s words.—The city, as before mentioned, was divided into sesti or sections.
The Elisei resided near the entrance of that, named after the Porta San Piero, which was the last reached by the competitors in the annual Florentine race. Those races took place on the 24th of June, the festival of St. John the Baptist.
“The prize was the Palio, or mantle of crimson silk velvet”, says Villani, and the race was run from San Pancrazio, the western sesto of the city, through the Mercato Vecchio, to the eastern sesto of San Piero. These Florentine races, like those until the last century held in Rome, were horseraces, horses running without riders.
Cacciaguida is the first ancestor of the Elisei concerning whom anything certain is known. It is however doubtful if Cacciaguida’s family-name was already Elisei, as family-names were not much used in those days. It is supposed that from Cacciaguida’s brother Eliseo the Elisei took their name, as the Alighieri took theirs from Cacciaguida’s son Alighiero, so named after his mother’s family, the Alighieri of Ferrara. Alighiero’s son was Bellincion degl’Alighieri, Dante’s grandfather, whose son called Alighiero was Dante’s father.
Cacciaguida tells of himself, that he was born 1090 (or 1106) and that he died fighting in the crusade under Emperor Conrad III 1147. Some historians have tried to follow the ancestors of Dante up to the days of Julius Caesar. But the Poet himself—through the mouth of Cacciaguida—sums up his communications with the words:
“Basti dei miei maggiori udirne questo; Chi ei si furo, edonde venner quivi, Più è tacer che ragionare onesto”. (Suffice it of my elders to hear this, But who they were, and whence they hither came, Silence is more considerate than speech).
As much as to say, that he himself had no further knowledge of his ancestors and that he neither cared, nor found it necessary for his honour to prove his descent from a very ancient family.