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canzone

Source:
The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature
Author(s):

Pietro Beltrami

canzone. 

The major metrical form in early Italian lyric poetry. It is divided into strophes (stanze) each consisting of two piedi (‘feet’), each with the same metrical structure (of two to six lines), rhymed in varying ways, but so that no line remains without a rhyme; followed by a sirma which cannot be divided into two similarly corresponding parts and which has varying rhyme schemes (often the first line of the sirma rhymes with the last line of the piedi). Instead of the sirma (more infrequently and mainly in the 13th c.) the canzone can have two volte constructed in the same way as the piedi. It normally ends with an indivisible last verse or congedo (‘farewell’) which is shorter than the stanza.

[Pietro Beltrami]