Santerno

Description

In Canto XXVII of the Inferno the river Santerno appears together with the Lamone to delimit the territory of the two lords of Romagna cited by Dante: Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi, who holds Forlì with the green lion in his coat of arms, and the Malatesta, father and son, lords of Rimini, defined as mastiffs for their cruelty. The periphrasis with the two watercourses is part of the catalogue of local tyrants that the poet entrusts to Guido da Montefeltro, in the eighth circle among the fraudulent counselors. The verse that mentions them belongs to the series of heraldic similitudes with which the Florentine evokes the lords who had taken control of the Romagnol cities in the first decades of the fourteenth century.