Mediterranean Boccaccio: Geography, Magic and ‘Poetry’ between Paris, Florence and Naples

A course on Mediterranean Boccaccio originates from the awareness that a culture and its visual and literary texts cannot be considered without taking into account the context that generated them. The context we consider in this class is the culture of the Mediterranean in XIII and XIV Centuries, namely the cultural, commercial and intellectual exchanges through the Mare Nostrum. The course aims to follow the path of what can be considered as mostly ‘Mediterranean’ in the Decameron starting from a study of the representation of the cities and in particular of the city of Naples, one of the Mediterranean cities most loved by Boccaccio. In this course the students will be introduced to a reading of Boccaccio’s texts with a particular focus on the Decameron, a literary, social and cultural observatory of Italy in XIV Century. The approach is both philological, as a ‘direct’ access to the Italian texts, and cultural by means of contextualizing them in the literary and social setting that generated it.
The first part of this course aims to locate Boccaccio within Mediterranean culture by looking at the role of Florence with Naples and France and the relationship Boccaccio had with the Florentine Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Grand Seneschal of the Angevin Kingdom in Naples, not to mention the impact that the Southern city had on Boccaccio’s literary imaginary.

The second part of the course is the actual reading of Boccaccio’s texts and it follows progressively the themes of the Decameron. The students receive a list of selected novelle from selected Days of the Decameron.
The themes are: Decameron as “epopea dei mercatanti” (V. Branca), Boccaccio and the romance tradition in Old French; literary models of the Decameron; geography, otherness (the role of Islam), women, tricksters, merchants and travelers; Mediterranean cities (Sicily, Jerusalem, Babylon) and gardens, magic and necromancy, poetry and the role of the poet/narrator. A mandatory and complementary part of this course is, in the last three weeks, the theatre workshop led by the Florentine director Carlo Romiti that will direct the student’s performance of Alatiel’ story (Decameron II 6) .

Required texts: G. Boccaccio, Decameron, a cura di V. Branca. 2 Voll. Lessico critico decameroniano, ed. R. Bragantini e P. M. Forni, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1997. Boccaccio geografo, ed. R. Morosini, M. Gennari.