So, on the Wednesday following, they set out, preceded by servants and victuals, to a villa two miles from Florence, “with a goodly and great courtyard in its midst, and galleries and saloons and bedchambers, each in itself most fair, and adorned with jocund paintings; with lawns and grassplots round about, and wondrous-goodly gardens, and wells of very cold water, and cellars full of wines of price.”45 The ladies and gentlemen sleep late, breakfast leisurely, walk in the gardens, dine at length, and amuse themselves by matching stories. It is agreed that each of the ten shall tell a story on each day of the outing. They stay in the country ten days (whence the title of the book, from the Greek deka hemerai, ten days); and the result is that Boccaccio’s commedia umana counters each of Dante’s gloomy cantos with a merry tale. Meanwhile a rule forbids any member of the group to “bring in from without any news other than joyous.”
The narratives, averaging six pages in length, were seldom original with Boccaccio; they were collected from classical sources, Oriental writers, medieval gesta, French contes and fabliaux, or the folklore of Italy itself. The last and most famous story in the book is that of the patient Griselda, which Chaucer adopted for one of the best and most absurd of The Canterbury Tales. The finest of Boccaccio’s novelle is the ninth of the fifth day—of Federigo, his falcon, and his love, almost as self-sacrificing as Griselda’s. The most philosophical is the legend of the three rings (I, 3). Saladin, “Soldan of Babylon,” needing money, invites the rich Jew Melchisedek to dinner, and asks him which of the three religions is the best—the Jewish, the Christian, or the Mohammedan. The wise old moneylender, fearing to speak his mind directly, answers with a parable:
There was once a great man and a rich, who, among other very precious jewels in his treasury, had a goodly and costly ring…. Wishing to leave it in perpetuity to his descendants, he declared that whichever of his sons should, at his death, be found in possession thereof, by his bequest unto him, should be recognized as his heir, and be held by all the others in honor and reverence as chief and head. He to whom the ring was left held a like course with his own descendants, and did even as his father had done. In brief, the ring passed from hand to hand, through many generations, and came at last into the possession of a man who had three goodly and virtuous sons all very obedient to their father, whereof he loved all three alike. The young men knowing the usance of the ring, each desiring to be the most honored among his folk… besought his father, who was now an old man, to leave him the ring…. The worthy man, who knew not himself how to choose to which he had liefer leave the ring, bethought himself… to satisfy all three, and privily let make by a good craftsman other two rings which were so like unto the first that he himself scarce knew which was the true. When he came to die he secretly gave each one of his sons his ring, wherefore each of them, seeking, after their father’s death, to occupy the inheritance and the honor and denying it to the others, produced his ring in witness of his right, and the three rings being found so like one another that the true might not be known, the question which was the father’s very heir abode pending and yet pendeth. And so I say to you, my lord: of the three Laws given by God the Father to the three peoples, each people deemeth itself to have His inheritance, His true Law and His commandments; but of which in very deed hath them, even as of the rings, the question yet pendeth.
Such a story suggests that in his thirty-seventh year Boccaccio was not a dogmatic Christian. Contrast his tolerance with the bitter bigotry of Dante, who condemns Mohammed to perpetually repeated vivisections in hell.46 In the second story of The Decameron the Jew Jehannat is converted to Christianity by the argument (adapted by Voltaire) that Christianity must be divine, since it has survived so much clerical immorality and simony. Boccaccio makes fun of asceticism, purity, the confessional, relics, priests, monks, friars, nuns, even the canonization of saints. He thinks most monks are hypocrites, and laughs at the “simpletons” who give them alms (VI, 10). One of his most hilarious stories tells how the friar Cipolla, to raise a good collection, promised his audience to display “a very holy relic, one of the angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber after the Annunciation” (VI, 10). The most obscene of the stories tells how the virile youth Masetto satisfied an entire nunnery (III, ). In another tale Friar Rinaldo cuckolds a husband; whereupon the narrator asks, “What monks are there that do not do thus?” (VII, 3)
The ladies in The Decameron blush a bit at such stories, but enjoy the Rabelaisian-Chaucerian humor; Filomena, a girl of especially nice manners, tells the tale of Rinaldo; and sometimes, says Boccaccio’s least happy image, “the ladies kept up such a laughing that you might have drawn all their teeth.”47 Boccaccio had been reared in the loose gaiety of Naples, and most often thought of love in sensual terms; he smiled at chivalric romance, and played Sancho Panza to Dante’s Don Quixote. Though twice married he seems to have believed in free love.48 After recounting a score of stories that would today be unfit for a male gathering, he makes one of the men say to the ladies: “I have noted no act, no word, in fine nothing blameworthy, either on your part or on that of us men.” In concluding his book the author acknowledges some criticism of the license he has used, and especially because “I have in sundry places written the truth about the friars.” At the same time he congratulates himself on his “long labor, thoroughly accomplished with the aid of the Divine favor.”
The Decameron remains one of the masterpieces of world literature. Its fame may be due more to its morals than to its art, but even if immaculate it would have merited preservation. It is perfectly constructed—superior in this respect to The Canterbury Tales. Its prose set a standard that Italian literature has never surpassed, a prose sometimes involved or flowery, but for the most part eloquent and vigorous, pungent and vivacious, and clear as a mountain stream. It is a book of the love of life. In the greatest disaster that had befallen Italy in a thousand years Boccaccio could find in his vitals the courage to see beauty, humor, goodness, and joy still walking the earth. At times he was cynical, as in his unmanly satire on women in the Corbaccio; but in The Decameron he was a hearty Rabelais, relishing the give and take, the rough and tumble, of life and love. Despite caricature and exaggeration the world recognized itself in the book; every European language translated it; Hans Sachs and Lessing, Molière and La Fontaine, Chaucer and Shakespeare, took leaves from it admiringly. It will be enjoyed when all of Petrarch’s poetry has entered the twilight realm of the praised unread.
VIII. SIENA
Siena would have challenged the claim of Florence to have begotten the Renaissance. There too the violence of faction raised the temperature of thought, and communal pride nourished art The woolen industry, the export of Sienese products to the Levant, and the trade of the Via Flaminia between Florence and Rome gave the city a moderate affluence; by 1400 the squares and principal streets were paved with brick or stone; and the poor were rich enough to stage a revolution. In 1371 the woolworkers besieged the Palazzo Pubblico, broke down its doors, expelled the businessmen’s government, and set up the rule of the riformatori. A few days later an army of two thousand men, fully equipped by the mercantile interests, made its way into the city, invaded the quarters of the proletariat, and slew men, women, and children without discrimination or mercy, spitting some on the lance, hacking others with the sword. The nobility and the lower middle class came to the rescue of the commons, the counterrevolution was defeated, and the reform government gave Siena the most honest administration that the citizens could recall. In 1385 the rich merchants rose again, overthrew the riformatori, and expelled four thousand rebel workmen from the city. From that date industry and art declined in Siena.*