Career
She spent her last days in Florence in the household of Cavalcante de" Cavalcanti, where Dante came to know her in person. She appears in the “Third Sphere” in his Paradiso (Canto IX, lines 13–65). A fictionalised account of the courtship between Riccardo and Cunizza, one with quite a different outcome, forms the basis for Giuseppe Verdi"s first opera, Oberto conte di San Bonifacio.
Cunizza is mentioned in both Robert Browning"s Sordello and Ezra Pound"s Cantos.