Giovanni Boccaccio (Certaldo, July 1313 \u2013 Certaldo, 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer and poet and is regarded as one of the most important figures in the European literary landscape of the fourteenth century.
\nTogether with Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, he is counted among the so-called \u201cThree Crowns\u201d of Italian literature.
\nConsidered by many scholars to be the greatest European prose writer of his time, Boccaccio distinguished himself through his extraordinary versatility: he was able to blend different literary tendencies and genres into original works, thanks to a creative activity marked by strong experimentation.
\nHe is also remembered as one of the precursors of Humanism: together with his friend Petrarch, he helped lay its foundations, especially within the Florentine cultural environment.
\nHis most famous work is the Decameron (1351), a collection of novellas that played a fundamental role in the formation of the Italian literary tradition.
\nHis importance was also recognized in subsequent centuries, particularly in the sixteenth century, when Pietro Bembo elevated Boccaccio\u2019s style to the model of Italian prose.
\nBoccaccio\u2019s influence was not limited to the Italian cultural sphere, but extended throughout Europe, exerting a significant influence on authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, a central figure in English literature, and Miguel de Cervantes. During the last twenty years of his life, Boccaccio devoted himself primarily to the composition of encyclopaedic works strongly marked by Humanist thought, fully reflecting the new cultural climate of the age.
\nTo this period belongs the Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), a monumental mythological treatise in Latin in fifteen books, composed at the request of Hugh IV of Lusignan, King of Cyprus. The work was conceived with the aim of bringing order to the \u201cchaos\u201d of classical mythology, attempting to reconstruct the complex genealogical trees, lineages, and kinships of the divinities of the Greco-Roman pantheon, while also collecting and explaining numerous myths from the ancient tradition.
\nIn Chapter IX, entitled De Scylla filia Phorci (\u201cOn Scylla, Daughter of Phorcys\u201d), Boccaccio deploys his erudition, structuring the passage not as a simple narrative, but as a true critical survey of ancient sources.
\nHe reviews the testimonies of numerous authors who dealt with Scylla, comparing their representations in order to provide the most complete and exhaustive picture possible.
\nHe begins with the epic model of Homer, from whom he draws the most terrifying and primordial description of the monster: a creature with six heads, ready to seize sailors.
\nTo this he immediately adds the lesson of Ovid, who introduces the human and tragic dimension of the myth, outlining the figure of Scylla before her transformation and describing her as a beautiful nymph whose metamorphosis is the result of the jealousy and magical arts of Circe.
\nHe continues his analysis by turning to Virgil, with the representation of Scylla as a hybrid being, confined within a dark cave, with the face of a maiden and a body ending in wolf tails.
\nAlongside these poetic visions he carefully places the interpretations of ancient commentators, allowing him to give the subject a more rationalistic turn.
\nThrough this comparison between poets and mythographers, Boccaccio seeks to harmonize the different truths contained in the texts. The result is an organic discourse in which the plurality of classical voices converges toward a synthesis that is at once literary, geographical, and moral, demonstrating how each author added a fundamental piece to the understanding of this ancient mythological figure and of the place that gave rise to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cScylla, as Servius says, was the daughter of Phorcys and the nymph Crataeis.
\nWhom, as Ovid says, Glaucus, the sea god from the city of Anthedon, loved, and because he preferred her to Circe, daughter of the Sun, who loved him, Circe, enraged, poisoned the spring in which Scylla used to bathe, so that when Scylla entered it as usual, she was suddenly transformed into various forms down to the pubic region; however, horrified by her deformity, she threw herself into the nearby sea and, through the power of her lover Glaucus, became a goddess of the sea. Others say that she was transformed into a sea monster.
\nWhose form is thus described by Maro: But the cave holds Scylla, blind, with mouth stretched wide and drags ships upon the rocks.
\nThe first part a human face and a beautiful breast, a maiden; the latter, with enormous body, a porcupine, with dolphin tails entrusted to the wombs of wolves.
\nHomer, however, describes her differently in the Odyssey, in a long series of verses, almost in this sense.
\nFor he says that she barks and has the voice of a newborn puppy, horrible in appearance, and has twelve feet, with six heads, and on each head a huge mouth with three rows of teeth, full of black death, and that she stands in the middle of a cave and thrusts her heads into the deepest sea, where she catches dolphins or whales.
\nLeontius, however, tells a different story about Scylla.
\nFor he relates that when Scylla was involved with Neptune, his wife Amphitrite, moved by jealousy, sprinkled the waters in which she used to bathe and transformed her into a wild dog, which Hercules, returning with his prey after defeating Geryon the Spaniard, killed because it had seized his cattle; but her father restored her to life. Having said this, it is necessary to explain what these stories conceal.
\nThere are therefore those who suppose that once, on the shores of Calabria, beside a narrow bay separated from Sicily, there lived a foreign woman of extraordinary beauty and great cunning who, consumed by burning lust, with modest manners and honest speech by which she pretended to be a virgin or a most chaste matron, exposed unwelcome guests to her lust through her intrigues, and a place well suited to the fable.
\nWhich, it is said, Circe hated. Circe is called the hand of judgment or of labour, as if she were Cironera.
\nA lustful woman does not love manual work or labour. That is all.
\nBut Glaucus, above, where Circe is discussed, is taken to mean the foam of the sea, of which Mount Circe abounds at its base because of the rocks against which the sea breaks through impact, and likewise the rock of Scylla; but enough of this where Circe is discussed.
\nBut Sallust says: the rock resembles in its famous form what those who see it from afar perceive; it is thought that dogs and wolves were imagined from it because the places themselves are full of sea monsters, and the roughness of the rocks imitates the barking of dogs. Yet we shall adapt these fictions in a somewhat more explanatory way.
\nIt is absolutely certain that on the Italian side, in sight of the coast of Tauromenium, the rocks are enormous, cavernous and pointed, sharp as knives, and extend into the Strait of Sicily; where, in that inlet where the ocean is constantly agitated, that is by ebb and flow, the sea is carried with such speed and violence that nothing appears swifter or more powerful.
\nMoreover, when the winds blow from the North toward the South, and from the South toward the North, they drive the waves in that strait against one another with such force that they seem raised to the heavens by their collisions; from this there arises so violent a motion that, when the waves enter the caves of Scylla, a tremendous noise is produced, which continuously imitates the barking of dogs and the howling of wolves; and because the waters always descend into the void, it happens that, as they descend into the caves of Scylla, their great force drags with them any ships that may be there; and thus Virgil\u2019s fiction is established by the truth of the facts.
\nThat she has many heads, as Homer says, is nothing other than the plurality of rocks present there, which rise up from the depths lifting their heads, and according to their number possess feet, that is, suitable foundations.
\nBut the many mouths and rows of teeth signify nothing other than the numerous channels running between the sharp rocks, which are indeed full of black death, that is, the danger of death for those who enter them.
\nThat fishing is done there among dolphins and whales is said for this reason, because that place is always rich in large and monstrous fish.
\nNow that Leontius said that Scylla is mingled with Neptune is evident; for, as is clear, the rock extends into the sea, and there is always storm and noise there, therefore it is imagined that Amphitrite poured drugs into it.
\nBut that Hercules killed her, Theodosius says, is an invention, because the son of one of the Cyclopes perished among the rocks of Scylla, and for this reason the Cyclopes, in revenge, blocked the mouth of Scylla with great stones cast into it and rendered the strait impassable, and for this reason Scylla was said to have died; however, with the passage of time, the sea, having washed everything away, restored the place to its former shape, and thus the daughter was restored by Phorcys.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>Giuseppe Ribuffo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/i>Next Page: Nonnus of Panopolis, Le Dionisiache, V d.C.<\/span><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1709,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1228","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nGiovanni Boccaccio - 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