me, Pietro degli Onesti, called Pietro _Il
Peccatore_[1] This confusion, which Dante disposes of in the
well-known passage of the _Paradiso_:

"In quel loco fui 10, Pier Damiano,
e Pietro Peccator fu nella casa
Di nostra Donna in sul lito Adriano,"[2]

is commented upon in one of Boccaccio's letters to his friend
Petrarch.[3] It is true both Peters were of Ravenna, but whereas
Blessed Pietro _Il Peccatore_ was of the Onesti family, as was S.
Romuald, S. Pietro Damiano was not; the last died in 1072 at Faenza as
we have seen, the first as we may think in 1119.

[Footnote 1: It is I confess doubtful whether Pietro degli Onesti was
ever called _Il Peccatore_ till a later epoch. The authenticity of the
letters in which he so styles himself is open to question and the
inscription on his tomb is it seems of the fifteenth century.]

[Footnote 2: _Paradiso_, xxi. 121-123. "In quel loco" refers to Fonte
Avellana.]

[Footnote 3: Cf. Corazzini, _Lettere edite ed inedite di Giovanni
Boccaccio_ (Firenze, 1877), p. 307.]

Now though all were famous and all were of Ravenna it is the last and
I suppose the least of them who is most closely connected with the
city. The others went away and won, not only great place in the world,
but an everlasting fame. Blessed Pietro _Il Peccatore_ stayed in
Ravenna and built there outside the walls in the marsh between Ravenna
and Classe the great home of Our Lady, S. Maria in Porto fuori. About
the middle of the eleventh century, Dr Ricci tells us, certain
religious retired into the solitude by the shore of the Adriatic and
there built a little church or oratory that was called S. Maria _in
fossula_. In this act we may certainly see the example of S. Romuald.
But about 1096 there joined himself to them Pietro degli Onesti called
_Il Peccatore_, and perhaps because he was of the Onesti he built
there a new and a larger church, it is said in fulfilment of a vow
made, as was Galla Placidia's, in a storm at sea. It is this church
which in great part we still see, with additions of the thirteenth
century, a lonely and beautiful thing in the emptiness of the sodden
fields to the south-east of Ravenna between the Canale del Molino and
the Fiumi Uniti.

The lonely and melancholy church of S. Maria in Porto fuori is a
basilica consisting of three naves which formed a part of the original
church of the Blessed Pietro, and a presbytery, apse, and chapels
which are of the thirteenth century. Ther