Few titles in our literature are as enigmatic as the one chosen by Boccaccio for his masterpiece. We have known since school days that Decameron is based on the Greek and refers to the ten days that make up the architecture of the work (déka ten, hemorrhoids day). But much more still eludes us. It will be remembered that the book is aimed at women: it is for them “rescue and refuge” that Boccaccio intends to tell his “hundred short stories or fables or parables or histories, whatever we want to say”. But which reader (or reader) could grasp the meaning of such a title? In the fourteenth century, not only in Florence but throughout Western Europe, knowledge of Greek was very rare.
The oldest attestation we know of the title Decameron (with the accent on the last, as it must have been pronounced at the time) is found in a manuscript now preserved in the National Library of Florence, dating back to the early 60s of the fourteenth century. It is a codex made in Naples when Boccaccio was still alive. The Decameron he was then less than ten years old. Although it is reasonable to believe that some novellas were composed before 1348, the drawing of a framed book of the plague must have cleared up in Boccaccio’s mind when that experience was still close (the hypothesized dates range between 1351 and 1353). . This perhaps also explains his need to describe the effects of the contagion so realistically: not to remove that tragedy from the book by starting only with the escape from the city. A need to testify, for oneself and for others, what had been passed through. Of course, Boccaccio must have known that his readers would read those pages with a mixture of pain and relief: pain for what they had suffered and relief for surviving. We do not know, of course, when he decided to call his book that. Nor if really – as has been hypothesized – the model was theHexaemeron, an exegetical treatise by Saint Ambrose on the six days of Creation (gr. hexa-, hey six). What we can say is that the title refers to a very different aspect from the teeming merchant world that feeds most of the novels. It is linked to the reading of the classics, to the discovery of the ancient, to the passion for Dante (whose main book – not a secondary detail – had as its title a word of Greek origin, Comedy).
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This aspect of Boccaccio’s culture has been illuminated, in recent years, by extraordinary discoveries and new investigations. A book edited by Maurizio Fiorilla and Irene Iocca now collects the fruit of these researches and makes it available to readers in a compact and well-organized form. The volume involves some of Boccaccio’s greatest scholars and is divided into two parts: a first part with chapters dedicated to the various works; a second part with transversal insights: on archival documents, on autographs, on language and style, on correspondence (starting from the fundamental one with Petrarch), on the cult of Dante, on philological and scholarly research. It is an excellent work for clarity and breadth of horizons. The dialogue between the various parts and the network of internal references allow the different aspects of Boccaccio’s culture to be welded together. The whole conveys the sense of a research that is anything but firm: perspectives for new insights are visible in almost all the chapters.
I limit myself here to the relationship with the Greek language. It should be remembered that Boccaccio – together with Petrarch – played a decisive role in promoting the translation from Greek into Latin of theIliade andOdyssey made by Leonzio Pilato, decisive for the diffusion ofemail Homeric in Europe. Boccaccio himself tells of having hosted Leonzio in his home in Florence, of having heard the Latin translation of theIliade and of having spent his time to give public lectures, which happened between 1360 and 1362. A codex, now preserved in the Marciana of Venice, bears witness to a central moment of that intellectual adventure: it is the manuscript on which Leonzio Pilato copied the ‘Odyssey in Greek by inserting its Latin translation into line spacing. It is on that code that Boccaccio and Petrarch read Homer, as evidenced by the annotations of both in the margins. Between the two, Boccaccio is the most advanced in the discovery of Greek: elsewhere, in his manuscripts, there are citations in the original language. Not only. A detail tells us of Boccaccio’s love for that language. It is found on the last page of a codex today in Toledo in which Boccaccio copied the whole Comedy of Dante. It is a portrait of Homer surmounted by Dante’s verse “Homero poeta sovereign” (Inf. IV 88). Below, barely visible under ultraviolet rays, Boccaccio added something else: his name in Latin transliterated into Greek characters.
Boccaccio, edited by Maurizio Fiorilla and Irene Iocca. Essays by D. Piccini, R. Bragantini, S. Finazzi, A. Piacentini, S. Carrai, V. Rovere, CM Monti, L. Regnicoli, R. Cella, M. Cursi, M. Berté, L. Azzetta, M Petoletti. Carocci, p. 405, € 34