Dante's precocious studies of grammar and rhetoric brought him into con-tact with the Latin authors; but it was also the stimula-tion of Florence's cultural environment that fostered a natural inclination toward poetry while he was still a youth. Florence in those years was the meeting place of many literary currents. For Dante, in the years of his literary apprenticeship, two masters stood out above all the others: Brunetto Latini and Guido Cavalcanti. Dante himself confesses that it was Brunetto who taught him "how man becomes eternal", that is, how he leaves a last-ing trace of himself through his literary works. But be- yond the poet's own important admission, it is easy to grasp the extent of the influence; Latini, who had re-turned to Florence from exile in France in 1266 and, after having regained important public appointments in the commune, died in about 1294, almost certainly fur-nished Alighieri with the first documents of Ars dictandi - that is to say, of the art of letter writing - and so of writing ornate Latin prose; also, active as a rhymer in vernacular Italian and as a philosophical prose writer, he undoubtedly represented a model which Dante kept before him from the beginning of his apprenticeship as poet. Brunetto's rhetorical and literary instruction is evi-dent in the numerous adaptations from his texts, present in Dante's major and minor works, both in Latin and in Italian, and particularly in two early poetic exercises, forcefully executed and not far apart from each other- the Detto d'amore and the Fiore.