Though the innovative generations of Trecento musicians forged new genres and styles of music in the Italian North and down the peninsula, French cultural influence was never far off. The Italian Ballata form, a fixed refrain structure for both poetry and music, may have ultimately been derived from the French Virelai which dates to the Troubadors, and the newer Italian "Madrigal" (not to be confused with the later sixteenth-century genre of the same name) was sometimes thought vulgar by poets and patrons. Yet the music thrived, and by the time Francesco Landini arrived on the Tuscan musical scene, he could step into the midst of distinct and beautiful local styles. In his hands and those of his contemporaries, the Italian Ballata grew to assimilate certain French traits such as cadence formulas, different melismatic passages, and the subtlety of French rhtyhmic notation. A piece such as Landini's three-voiced Ballata Non avrá mai pietá demonstrates how well he adopted these traits, and bequeathed an even more robust Italian style to later musicians who apparently studied copies of it.

Instead of the Italian madrigal's musical commonplace of beginning its melody on a high pitch and melismatically wending the singer's way downward, Landini here begins in a moderate vocal range, and slowly develops his phrases to their more natural climax. Each melody follows its path carefully and unhurriedly, frequently graced by supple rhtyhmic variations. He is apparently so concerned with the shape of the principal melody that the middle voice crosses above it with surprising frequency. His harmonic foci are characteristically unified, though he does apply the particularly French characteristic of ending two successive sections on "open" and "closed" (or more harmonically resolved) harmonies in the middle of the piece. The story told in the poem, by [Bartolomeomore?] d'Alesso Donati, is an old one. The poet rhetorically impeaches the god Love himself: his beloved will nevermore show pity upon him unless Love convinces her of his ardor. If she can be divinely brought to understand how great is his pain over her beauty, the pain which increases in him every day, perhaps she will relent and give him satisfaction.

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