Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  Seventh Story

  1. a poor man’s daughter Simona and her lover, Pasquino, have special significance as the first working-class hero and heroine in the history of European tragic literature. Both are engaged in the manufacture of woollens, the staple industry of medieval Florence and the source of much of its wealth.

  2. the pardoning at San Gallo According to Franco Sacchetti (c. 1330–1400), it was the custom, on the first Sunday of the month, for Florentines from the poorer classes to go to one of the churches outside the San Gallo gate to receive indulgences and spend the day in the countryside.

  3. sage The tragic events of the tale are based on a popular superstition, recorded in a document of the early thirteenth century, according to which the leaves of a sage bush could be rendered poisonous through being nibbled by toads.

  4. Guccio Imbratta A character who turns up again as Friar Cipolla’s servant in VI, 10.

  Eighth Story

  1. turn a plum into an orange The Italian text reads ‘fare del pruno un melrancio’, literally ‘to make an orange-tree out of a plum-tree’, implying that what is unremarkable may be transformed into something more desirable. The nearest English equivalent (‘to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’) is inappropriate to the particular context.

  Ninth Story

  1. Guillaume de Cabestanh The name is that of an early thirteenth-century Provençal poet, who dedicated two of his compositions to his lord and master, Raimon de Castel-Roussillon. Another Provençal poet narrates the story of Cabestanh’s amorous liaison with Raimon’s wife, ending in the tragic deaths of the two lovers. B., who was familiar with the Provençal tradition, changed Raimon’s name to Guillaume and wove a narrative of his own from various threads including an allegorical episode from Dante’s Vita nuova and the tragedy Thyestes, by Seneca. In Chapter III of the Vita nuova, Dante describes a dream in which he saw a fearsome-looking figure bearing in his arms a naked woman draped in a blood-stained sheet. In one of his hands, he is holding Dante’s heart, which he compels the lady to eat. In Seneca’s tragedy, Thyestes is invited to a banquet at which he unwittingly devours the flesh of his own sons.

  Tenth Story

  1. Mazzeo della Montagna Matteo (or Mazzeo) Selvatico, a native of Mantua, was author of a medical encyclopaedia which he dedicated to King Robert of Naples in 1317. The work, written in Latin, adds the adjective ‘mantuanus’ (‘of Mantua’) to the name of its author, which in popular speech became corrupted to ‘montanus’ (‘of the mountain’), hence Matteo della Montagna. Matteo, one of the most famous physicians at the earliest European medical school at Salerno, died in extreme old age at some time after 1342. B. would certainly have heard of him, and may even have made his acquaintance, during his sojourn in Naples between 1327 and 1341.

  2. Amalfi About fifteen miles to the west of Salerno.

  (Conclusion)

  1. one of the ladies dancing The reference is almost certainly to Filomena, the name of the dedicatee of the Filostrato, which tells the story of the ill-fated love of Troilus for Cressida.

  FIFTH DAY

  (Introduction)

  1. shortly after nones Around 3 p.m. See notes to Introduction to First Day (p. 805).

  First Story

  1. Cimon The initial idea for the character of Cimon possibly came from a passage in Valerius Maximus linking the name with imbecility in the popular imagination. Neither he nor the other characters in the story have any historical basis. The transformation of the main character from idiot to nonpareil by the vision of a beautiful woman is strongly reminiscent of ideas expounded by earlier Italian poets, more especially because of the hypnotic effect produced on Cimon when Iphigenia opens her eyes (‘Cimon made no reply, but stood there gazing into her eyes, which seemed to shine with a gentleness that filled him with a feeling of joy such as he had never known before’ – p. 369). The story may thus be read as an attempt to translate a major theme of the dolce stil novo into narrative terms, pursuing it to its extreme consequences, in this case involving a considerable amount of violence.

  2. the month of May The season, together with scenic elements such as the leafy wood and the cool fountain, are conventional ingredients of the rhetorical topos of the locus amænus. The sleeping Iphigenia, and her awakening, carry allegorical overtones of Cimon’s newly discovered awareness of his dormant potential for excellence.

  Second Story

  1. Lipari The island has figured earlier in the story of Madonna Beritola (II, 6). Otherwise relatively unimportant, it was well known as the scene of a naval battle in 1339. It was also a notorious haven for buccaneers, which might explain why B. chose that location for a story whose hero turns to piracy.

  2. Susa Unusually for B., whose knowledge of Mediterranean geography is in general surprisingly accurate, the particulars he gives of Gostanza’s voyage strain his reader’s credulity. The town of Susa indeed lies some hundred miles south of Tunis, but the distance by sea from Lipari, about 300 miles, could hardly have been covered in a single day under a ‘wind [that] blew so gently from the north that the sea was barely disturbed’ (p. 380). A breeze from that direction would in any case have driven Gostanza’s boat eventually on to the north coast of Sicily.

  Third Story

  1. Rome – which was once the head… of the civilized world The narrator is qualifying the inscription ‘Roma caput mundi’ (‘Rome the head of the world’) which appeared on Roman coinage. B.’s tale is set in the early part of the fourteenth century during the so-called ‘Babylonian Captivity’ (1309–77) of the papacy. The power vacuum resulting from the forced removal of the papal court to Avignon led to a state of lawlessness in Roman territory, which is graphically illustrated in this particular narrative.

  2. Anagni A hill-town some thirty miles south-east of Rome, the birth-place of four popes including Boniface VIII. It lies just off the Via Latina, the conventional route in B.’s day for travellers between Rome and Naples.

  3. the Orsini One of the oldest and most powerful of Roman princely families, the Orsini were staunch supporters of the Guelph, pro-papal cause in the struggles between Church and Empire in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Their long-standing rivals for political power in the papal territories were the Colonna family, who traditionally espoused the imperial cause of the Ghibellines. One assumes it is a band of Colonna supporters that has seized Pietro and now threatens to hang him from the branches of an oak.

  Fourth Story

  1. Lizio da Valbona A Guelph nobleman of Bertinoro, in the mountains of the Romagna between Cesena and Forlí, Lizio da Valbona was widely known in the late thirteenth century for his outstandingly noble and generous temperament. Dante refers to him (Purgatorio, XIV, 97) in a passage deploring the disappearance of such virtues in the Romagna of his own day. In the same line, he also refers to a Ghibelline nobleman of the Romagna, Arrigo Mainardi, and it is probable that B. had the passage in mind when selecting the names for the two male characters in his story.

  Fifth Story

  1. Fano A town on the Adriatic coast, north of Ancona.

  2. Faenza The street brawls described in the story may be supposed to have taken place around the year 1254, thirteen years after Faenza, which is situated halfway between Bologna and Rimini, had been captured and plundered by the troops of the Emperor Frederick II.

  Sixth Story

  1. Marin Bòlgaro Still alive in 1341, Marin Bulgaro was held in high esteem in the Angevin court for the assistance he had rendered to the monarchy earlier in the century in planning and building the Neapolitan fleet. He was known personally to B., who records him in glowing terms in De casibus virorum illustrium, a series of biographies of famous men, which also contains a flattering account of Giovanni of Procida, who later in the story is described as the ‘blood-brother’ of Landolfo, the father of the tale’s young hero, Gianni.

  2. swimming there and back The classical myth of Leander swimming across the Hellespont to join his beloved Hero, as recounted by Virg
il in the Georgics and by Ovid in the Heroides, was clearly in B.’s mind in depicting the strength of Gianni’s love for Restituta. The story of their love closely resembles one of the central episodes in an earlier work of B.’s, the Filocolo.

  3. King Frederick of Sicily Frederick II of Aragon succeeded his older brother James I as King of Sicily in 1296. Their mother was the widow of Peter of Aragon, Constance, who left the island in 1297, accompanied among others by Ruggieri di Loria, the Admiral of the Royal Fleet, who later in the story saves Gianni and Restituta from being burnt at the stake. The narrative is notionally set, therefore, at some time between 1296 and 1297.

  4. La Cuba The famous Moorish building in Palermo, built in the twelfth century, which has survived to the present day.

  5. from Cape Minerva to Scalea The coastline from Punta Campanella, opposite Capri, to Scalea, in northern Calabria.

  6. a huge, blazing torch Clearly symbolic of the king’s passionate intentions, the blazing torch recalls a similar narrative detail in the account of King Agilulf’s arrival at dead of night at the door leading to his queen’s bedroom (II, 2).

  7. Ischia would be lost to you tomorrow Despite its proximity to the Angevin capital, Ischia remained under Aragonese rule until 1299.

  Seventh Story

  1. King William William II, Norman King of Sicily (also referred to in IV, 4), reigned between 1166 and 1189.

  2. Amerigo Abate of Trapani For generations, from the Norman to the Aragonese period of Sicilian history, the Abbate family occupied high office in Trapani as capitani, or commanders of the local militia. There is no record of an Amerigo Abbate during the Norman period, but Arrigo (Amerigo) Abbate was active as privy counsellor to the Hohenstaufen kings, Frederick II and Manfred, during the thirteenth century. It has been suggested that the various references in the story to historical incidents are a fictional transposition to the twelfth century of events which took place at a much later date.

  3. Genoese pirates Piracy and slave-trading were practices with which the Genoese were traditionally associated. It was by Genoese pirates that Beritola’s children were seized (II, 6) on the island of Ponza.

  4. supposing him to be a Turk Being Armenian, Teodoro was already a Christian.

  5. Violante Not exactly commonplace, Violante was also the name of the seven-year-old daughter of the Count of Antwerp (II, 8). B.’s own daughter of that name, to whom he was deeply attached, was roughly the same age when she died in 1356.

  6. a series of thunderclaps The storm from which Violante and Teodoro take refuge, prefacing their experience of ‘Love’s ultimate delights’, is strongly reminiscent of the storm in Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid that leads to Dido taking shelter with Aeneas in a cave, with precisely the same consequences.

  7. the Viceroy The term used by B. is capitano, meaning the chief of the local militia. Since he was appointed directly by the royal court in Palermo, he was in effect the king’s representative.

  8. ambassadors from the King of Armenia The kingdom of Armenia, not to be confused with Armenia proper, was originally established as a principality by emigrating Armenians in Cilicia on the south-east coast of Asia Minor in the twelfth century, after Armenia had been overrun by the Seljuqs. Known to historians as Little Armenia or Lesser Armenia, it was an important assembly-point for Christian armies during the Crusades, as well as offering a secure route for Italian merchants trading with the Orient. Trapani, in Sicily, was a regular port of call on the route from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome. The ‘Crusade that was about to be launched’ was presumably the Third Crusade, which set out in May 1189 under the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who was drowned en route the following year. In that case the reference to the King of Armenia is anachronistic, as the principality did not become a kingdom until 1199.

  9. Lajazzo Located on the coast of Little Armenia, Lajazzo (Ayas) was the easternmost Christian port of call in the Mediterranean. An important trading centre, it was described by Marco Polo in II Milione as a town to which ‘all the spices and all the silk and cloth of gold are brought from the interior; and merchants from Venice, Genoa, and everywhere else come here to purchase them’.

  Eighth Story

  1. Ravenna The city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, was well known to B., who stayed there many times between 1346 and 1361–2. Dante had died in Ravenna in 1321, and several features in the tale that follows are clearly inspired by passages from the Commedia. The names of the two protagonists, Nastagio degli Onesti and the daughter of Paolo Traversari, recall the line from Purgatorio (XIV, 107) where Dante names the Anastagi and Traversari families as representatives of a tradition of courtesy that has now disappeared from the Romagna. In describing the Earthly Paradise (Purgatorio, XXVIII, 19–20), Dante likens the breezes among the leaves of the trees to the sirocco blowing through the pinewoods at Classe, which is where Nastagio, in B.’s story, experiences his awesome vision. The punishment meted out to the girl in the woods is reminiscent of the fate that befalls the souls of the Profligate in Dante’s Wood of the Suicides (Inferno, XIII), where they are torn apart by fearsome black mastiffs. Finally, Count Ugolino (Inferno, XXXIII) describes a prophetic dream in which he witnessed a wolf and its cubs being chased by hounds, which he saw ‘tear open the flanks of father and children with their sharp teeth’.

  2. towards the beginning of May Spring was the time of year associated by medieval poets with the experience of a vision, the classic example being Dante’s Commedia. The tradition of lovers’ visions being set in the month of May was one that continued into the Renaissance period.

  Ninth Story

  1. Coppo di Borghese Domenichi The eulogy of Coppo (=Jacopo) di Borghese Domenichi seems an irrelevant digression, but in fact confers upon the narrative a curiously appropriate sense of chivalrous virtue, wisdom and authority. In a long career of service to the Florentine republic dating back to 1308, Coppo had occupied the highest offices of state with great distinction, attracting the praise not only of B. but of other writers of the period. B. speaks highly of him elsewhere, notably in his commentary on the Commedia and in a letter he wrote in April 1353 to the companion of his youth, Zanobi da Strada, where he laments Coppo’s recent death. The qualities attributed by Fiammetta to Coppo as a storyteller (‘he excelled all others, for he was more coherent, possessed a superior memory, and spoke with greater eloquence’) could well apply, of course, to B. himself.

  2. Alberighi The Alberighi are listed in Dante’s Paradiso (XVI, 89) as one of the oldest Florentine families. They lived in the same quarter of the city as Dante’s own family, the Alighieri.

  3. Campi Campi Bisenzio, about ten miles north-west of Florence, on the road to Prato.

  Tenth Story

  1. Perugia The tale of the reluctant husband is probably set in Perugia because of the town’s homophile reputation.

  2. to go clogging through the dry The Italian text reads ‘andare in zoccoli per I’asciutto’, a proverbial expression for engaging in homosexual practices which has no real equivalent in English. Clogs (zoccoli) usually have sodomitic connotations in the literature of the period, a further example in the Decameron being found in the sermon of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10). The expression that follows (in Italian ‘portare altrui in nave per lo piovoso’) is perhaps self-explanatory, being partly akin to ‘do a wet bottom’, which Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, defines as ‘(of women) to have sexual intercourse’.

  3. Saint Verdiana feeding the serpents According to popular legend, two serpents entered the saint’s cell at Castelfiorentino, but realizing that they had been sent to drive her away and lead her into sin, she kept them with her and fed them.

  4. women exist for no other purpose Outwardly pro-feminist, the Decameron contains many such instances of misogynist sentiment. In this case the statement occurs in the context of the old bawd’s diatribe, itself a rhetorical exercise on the topos known as vituperium, of which the most common targets were women and the religious. />
  (Conclusion)

  1. ‘Monna Aldruda… tidings I bring’ The first of Dioneo’s extensive repertoire of bawdy songs is, like the others, plebeian in origin, and therefore considered by the queen unsuitable for the ears of a company of young patricians. In Chapter XX of his famous book on good manners, Il Calateo, Giovanni della Casa in the sixteenth century refers specifically to this passage from the Decameron, and counsels against the imitation of Dioneo’s ‘vulgar and plebeian manners’.

  SIXTH DAY

  (Introduction)

  1. a song about Troilus and Cressida The story of Troilus’s ill-fated love for Cressida was one that B. himself had told in the verses of the Filostrato. Having as its main theme the inconstancy of women, it forms an apt introduction to the account of the dispute between the servants over whether Sicofante’s wife went to her husband a virgin.

  2. a great commotion This is the only point in the whole of the Decameron at which the idyllic calm of the storytellers’ world is disturbed by an external event. The servants’ quarrel serves as a reminder, at the mid-point of the work, of the mundane happenings of normal everyday existence, as well as offering a pretext for the subject matter of the tales recounted on the seventh day.

  3. Sicofante The name, like those of the ‘mechanicals’ in the frame story, is of Greek origin, and means literally ‘a displayer of figs’, which in Italian could imply one who makes obscene gestures. But B. probably chose the name merely to convey an impression of the character’s simple-mindedness.