Guido Cavalcanti: Circle 6, Inferno 10   Dante's best friend, Guido Cavalcanti--a few years older than Dante--was an aristocratic white guelph and an erudite, accomplished poet in his own right. Guido's best known poem, Donna me prega ("A lady asks me"), is a stylistically sophisticated example of his philosophical view of love as a dark force that leads one to misery and often to death. When Dante says that Guido perhaps "held in disdain" someone connected with his friend's journey (Inf. 10.63), he may simply mean that Guido did not appreciate Beatrice's spiritual importance (she died in 1290). Guido's father, in any case, takes this past tense to mean that his son is already dead, while Dante-character in fact knows that Guido is still alive at the time of the journey (April 1300). But he will not live much longer. Worse still, Dante himself is partly--if indirectly--responsible for the death of his best friend in August 1300. As one of the priors of Florence (June 15 - August 15, 1300), Dante joined in a decision to punish both parties--white and black guelphs--for recent fighting by banishing ring-leaders, one of whom was Guido Cavalcanti, of the two sides. Tragically, Guido fell ill--perhaps with malaria--due to the bad climate of the region to which he was sent, and he died later that summer shortly before his scheduled return to Florence.