Trama del filostrato di boccaccio biography images

Giovanni Bocaccio — Certaldo — is known to be the author of the Decameron, a work we have all studied, sometimes with little interest, in high school. Boccaccio was essentially self-taught: he knew Latin and some Greek — unknown on the peninsula during the Middle Ages and only rediscovered at the end of Constantinople. Thanks to his time in Naples and his visit to Montecassino — a monastery which, like many others, was a fundamental cultural centre in the Middle Ages — he came across many Latin works which he studied from a Christian cultural perspective.

It was the meeting with Petrarch and the beginning of their letter correspondence that led Boccaccio to reread Classical writings from a humanistic point of view.

Trama del filostrato di boccaccio biography images: The Delphi Classics edition

He cannot escape, and only death awaits him. After an exchange of prisoners Criseyde finds herself in the Greek camp and before separating she promises Troilus that they would meet again after ten days. The main Latin source of inspiration for the Boccaccio del Filostrato is Ovid, and as a matter of fact he writes the following in the preface:.

Omnia sunt hominum tenui pendentia filo et subito casu quae valuere ruunt [2]. It is interesting to note how in the frame of this work Boccaccio states that he finds himself in a similar situation; he talks about himself and how, after having tasted love, he is abandoned: the author was in the kingdom of Naples and his beloved Filomena had been forced to leave.

Boccaccio, tried by the sufferings of love, looked for comfort in ancient writing and it is here that he found the story of Troilus and Criseyde. In this frame — unlike Cino — he speaks of love, separation and hope :. He remembers his beloved, he remembers his love in the places they spent together, places where he still passes by, alone.