La Vita Nuova contains 42 brief chapters (31 for Guglielmo Gorni) with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; one canzone is left unfinished, interrupted by the death of Beatrice Portinari, Dante's lifelong love.

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Dante's two-part commentaries explain each poem, placing them within the context of his life. The chapters containing poems consist of three parts: the semi-autobiographical narrative, the lyric that resulted from those circumstances, and brief structural outline of the lyric.The poems present a frame story, recounting Dante's love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when he was nine and she eight) all the way to his mourning after her death, and his determination to write of her "that which has never been written of any woman."

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Each separate section of commentary further refines Dante's concept of romantic love as the initial step in a spiritual development that results in the capacity for divine love (see courtly love). Dante's unusual approach to his piece — drawing upon personal events and experience, addressing the readers, and writing in Italian rather than Latin — marked a turning point in European poetry, when many writers abandoned highly stylized forms of writing for a simpler style.