Colonna, in the persona of Laura, to whom the work is "attributed", engages Petrarch in a lengthy tenzone, a literary joust, played against Petrarch's own poems, verses, and words. The poems so effectively censored here (and utterly illegible) are based on the order and words of the "Babylonia" sonnets (RVF 136-138), as can still be seen in the commentary.
This Stefano Colonna is not the Roman senator of the same name, Stefano Colonna the Elder, the father of Petrarch's early patrons in Avignon: Giacomo Bishop of Lombez, the Cardinal Giovanni, and Stefano the Younger. Petrarch's sonnet "Gloriosa columna" ("Glorious column" RVF 10) is dedicated to the elder Stefano, who outlived all his sons, living to the age of 100 (also of note the letter of consolation that Petrarch wrote to him in September 1348, following the death of his sons, Familiares VIII, 1). Giovanni Colonna was among the many of Petrarch's close friends to die in the plague of 1348, for whom (with Laura) the elegiac sonnet "Rotta h l'alta colonna e 'l verde lauro" [RVF 269, "The lofty column, the green laurel, felled . . ."] was written. Stefano the younger died in battle in 1347, while fighting the troups of Cola di Rienzo. Petrarch's association with the Colonna family goes back to his days as a student in Bologna, where he befriended the young Giacomo, who would be elected Bishop of Lombez in 1328 by Pope John XXII, in recognition for having nailed the excommunication of the emperor Ludwig of Bavaria to the door of a Roman church.
The Stefano of this work, Lord of Palestrina and "Roman Gentleman" as the title states, was a 16th century descendent of the same Roman family. He was a mercenary who served Cosimo I de' Medici as lieutenant general of the Tuscan army. Also a member of the Florentine Academy, he was the subject of one of painter Angelo Bronzino's most celebrated portraits.
