"Sweet New Style": Terrace 6, Purgatorio 24   When Bonagiunta da Lucca identifies a dolce stil novo ("sweet new style") as the defining difference between Dante and certain other Italian poets (including Bonagiunta himself: 24.55-62), he raises an issue that has challenged readers and scholars ever since. Is this "sweet new style" attributed to Dante alone or does it apply to a select group of poets, including perhaps the two Guidos, Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti, in addition to Dante? And what, precisely, does Bonagiunta mean by dolce stil novo in the first place?   The "style" would seem to bear some relation to the poem cited by Bonagiunta, "Ladies who have understanding of love," as indicative of the "new rhymes" brought forth by Dante (24.49-51). This is one of the most important poems of the Vita Nuova, the story--in a hybrid form of prose and poetry--of Dante's early life (nuovo can mean "new," "young" and / or "strange"), in particular the role of Beatrice from his first sight of her when he was nine years old to her death in 1290 and his eventual resolve (in the final paragraph) to "say of her what was never said of any other woman." The cited poem, the first of three major canzoni (longer compositions) in the book, marks a high turning point in Dante's development as a poet and a lover: he realizes that his happiness--indeed his beatitude--lies not in playing amorous games of hide-and-seek or (worse) wallowing in self-pity but rather in praising his beloved Beatrice. The young Dante will not stay true to this noble sentiment--as the Vita Nuova takes us on an emotional rollercoaster ride--but he occasionally succeeds in spectacular fashion. The sonnet "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" ("So gentle and so honest appears") not only conveys the direct, limpid qualities of Dante's "sweet new style" but it captures Dante's conception of Beatrice as a blessed being--and, literally, a "bearer of blessings"--whose greeting (saluto) is intrinsically related to the recipient's salvation or spiritual health (salute):   So gentle and so honest appears my lady when she greets others that every tongue, trembling, becomes mute, and eyes dare not look at her. She goes hearing herself praised, benevolently clothed in humility, and seems a thing come down from heaven to earth to reveal miraculousness.   She appears so pleasing to whoever beholds her that she sends through the eyes a sweetness to the heart, which no one understands who does not feel it: and it seems that from her lips moves a spirit, soothing and full of love, that goes saying to the soul: Sigh.   (Vita Nuova, trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], 111-12)   Beatrice, Dante explains after announcing her death, is symbolically a nine, the number occurring at key moments in Dante's relationship with Beatrice: as the square of three (the Holy Trinity), the number nine is a miracle.