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La Fiammetta By: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) |
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BY GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
TRANSLATED BY JAMES C. BROGAN 1907.
INTRODUCTION
Youth, beauty, and love, wit, gayety and laughter, are the component
parts of the delightful picture conjured up by the mere name of Giovanni
Boccaccio, the prince of story tellers for all generations of men. This
creator of a real literary epoch was born in Paris, in 1313, (in the
eleventh year of Dante's exile), of an Italian father and a French woman
of good family. His father was a merchant of Florence, whither he
returned with his son when the child was seven years old. The boy
received some education, but was placed in a counting house when he was
only thirteen, and at seventeen he was sent by his father to Naples to
enter another commercial establishment. But he disliked commerce, and
finally persuaded his father to allow him to study law for two years at
the University of Naples, during which period the lively and attractive
youth made brisk use of his leisure time in that gay and romantic city,
where he made his way into the highest circles of society, and
unconsciously gleaned the material for the rich harvest of song and
story that came with his later years. At this time he was present at the
coronation of the poet Petrarch in the Capitol, and was fired with
admiration for the second greatest poet of that day. He chose Petrarch
for his model and guide, and in riper manhood became his most intimate
friend. By the time he was twenty five, Boccaccio had fallen in love with the
Lady Maria, a natural daughter of King Robert of Naples, who had caused
her to be adopted as a member of the family of the Count d'Aquino, and
to be married when very young to a Neapolitan nobleman. Boccaccio first
saw her in the Church of San Lorenzo on the morning of Easter eve, in
1338, and their ensuing friendship was no secret to their world. For the
entertainment of this youthful beauty he wrote his Filicopo , and the
fair Maria is undoubtedly the heroine of several of his stories and
poems. His father insisted upon his return to Florence in 1340, and
after he had settled in that city he occupied himself seriously with
literary work, producing, between the years 1343 and 1355, the Teseide
(familiar to English readers as "The Knight's Tale" in Chaucer,
modernized by Dryden as "Palamon and Arcite"), Ameto, Amorosa Visione,
La Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolona , and his most famous work, the
Decameron , a collection of stories written, it is said, to amuse Queen
Joanna of Naples and her court, during the period when one of the
world's greatest plagues swept over Europe in 1348. In these years he
rose from the vivid but confused and exaggerated manner of Filocopo to
the perfection of polished literary style. The Decameron fully
revealed his genius, his ability to weave the tales of all lands and all
ages into one harmonious whole; from the confused mass of legends of the
Middle Ages, he evolved a world of human interest and dazzling beauty,
fixed the kaleidoscopic picture of Italian society, and set it in the
richest frame of romance. While he had the Decameron still in hand, he paused in that great
work, with heart full of passionate longing for the lady of his love,
far away in Naples, to pour out his very soul in La Fiammetta , the
name by which he always called the Lady Maria. Of the real character of
this lady, so famous in literature, and her true relations with
Boccaccio, little that is certain is known. In several of his poems and
in the Decameron he alludes to her as being cold as a marble statue,
which no fire can ever warm; and there is no proof, notwithstanding the
ardor of Fiammetta as portrayed by her lover who no doubt wished her to
become the reality of his glowing picture that he ever really received
from the charmer whose name was always on his lips anything more than
the friendship that was apparent to all the world. But she certainly
inspired him in the writing of his best works. The best critics agree in pronouncing La Fiammetta a marvelous
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