Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  “Irksome it is to myself to rehearse in detail so mournful a history. Wherefore, being minded to pass over so much thereof as I fairly can, I say that our city being thus depopulated, it so happened, as I afterwards learned from one of credit, that on Tuesday morning after Divine service the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella was almost deserted save for the presence of seven young ladies, habited sadly, in keeping with the season.... The first, being the eldest of the seven, we will call Pampinea, the second Fiammetta, the third Filomena, the fourth Emilia, the fifth we will distinguish as Lauretta, the sixth as Neifile, and the last, not without reason, shall be named Elisa. ’Twas not of set purpose but by mere chance that these ladies met in the same part of the church, but at length, grouping themselves into a sort of circle, ... they gave up saying paternosters and began to converse (among other topics) on the times.... Here we tarry (said Pampinea) as if one thinks for no other purpose than to bear witness to the number of corpses that are brought hither for interment.... If we quit the church we see dead or sick folk carried about, or we see those who for their crimes were of late exiled, ... but who now in contempt of the law, well knowing its ministers are sick or dead, have returned.... Nor hear we aught but: Such and such are dead.... Such and such are dying.... Or go we home, what see we there? I know not if you are in like case with me; but there where once were servants in plenty I find none left but my maid and shudder with terror.... And turn or tarry where I may, I encounter only the ghosts of the departed, not with their wonted mien but with something horrible in their aspect that appals me.... So (she continues) I should deem it most wise in us, our case being what it is, if, as many others have done before us and are doing now, we were to quit the place, and shunning like death the evil example of others, betake ourselves to the country and there live as honourable women on one of the estates of which none of us has any lack, with all cheer of festal gathering and other delights so long as in no particular we overstep the bounds of reason. There we shall hear the chant of birds, have sight of green hills and plains, of cornfields undulating like the sea, of trees of a thousand sorts; there also we shall have a larger view of the heavens, which, however harsh to usward, yet deny not their eternal beauty; things fairer far for eyes to rest on than the desolate walls of our city.... For though the husbandmen die there even as here the citizens, they are dispersed in scattered homes, and so ’tis less painful to witness. Nor, so far as I can see, is there a soul here whom we shall desert; rather we may truly say that we are ourselves deserted.... No censure then can fall on us if we do as I propose; and otherwise grievous suffering, perhaps death, may ensue.”

  Pampinea’s plan was received with eagerness, and while they were still discussing it there came into the church three young men, Pamfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo, the youngest about twenty-five years of age. These seemed to the ladies to be sent by Providence, for their only fear till now had been in carrying out their plans alone. So Pampinea, who had a kinsman among them, approached them, and greeting them gaily, opened her plan, and besought them on behalf of herself and her friends to join their company. The young men as soon as they found she was in earnest answered with alacrity that they were ready, and promptly before leaving the church set matters in train for their departure, and the next day at dawn they set out. Arrived at the estate they entered a beautiful palace in the midst of a garden, and again it was Pampinea who proposed that one among them should be elected chief for a day so that each might be in turn in authority. They at once chose Pampinea, whom Filomena crowned with bay leaves. Later, towards evening, they “hied them to a meadow ... and at the queen’s command ranged themselves in a circle on the grass and hearkened while she spoke thus: ‘You mark that the sun is yet high, the heat intense, and the silence unbroken save by the cicale among the olives. It were therefore the height of folly to quit this spot at present. Here the air is cool, and the prospect fair, and here, observe, are dice and chess. Take then your pleasure as you will; but if you hear my advice you will find pastime for the hot hours before us, not in play in which the loser must needs be vexed, ... but in telling stories in which the invention of one may afford solace to all the company of his hearers.’”

  This was found pleasing to all, and so Pampinea turned at last to Pamfilo, who sat at her right hand, and bade him lead off with one of his stories. So begins the series of immortal tales which compose the Decameron.655

  Such, then, is the incomparable design which the Decameron fills, beside which the mere haphazard telling of The Hundred Merry Tales seems barbarous, the setting of The Thousand and One Nights inadequate. That Boccaccio’s design has indeed ever been bettered might well be denied, but in The Canterbury Tales Chaucer certainly equalled it. If the occasion there is not so dramatic nor the surroundings at once so poignant and so beautiful, the pilgrimage progresses with the tales and allows of such a dramatic entry as that of the Canon and the Canon’s yeoman at Boghton-under-Blee. That entry was most fitting and opportune, right in every way, and though there is no inherent reason why the Decameron itself should not have been similarly broken in upon, the very stillness of that garden in the sunshine would have made any such interruption less acceptable.656

  The true weakness of the Decameron in comparison with that of the Canterbury Tales is not a weakness of design but of character. Each of Chaucer’s pilgrims is a complete human being; they all live for us more vividly than any other folk, real or imagined, of the fourteenth century in England, and each is different from the rest, a perfect human character and personality. But in the protagonists of the Decameron it is not so. There is nothing, or almost nothing, to choose between them. Pampinea is not different from Filomena,657 and may even be confused with Pamfilo or Filostrato. We know nothing of them; they are without any character or personality, and indeed the only one of them all who stands out in any way is Dioneo, and that merely because he may usually be depended upon for the most licentious tale of the day.658 In Chaucer the tales often weary us, but the tellers never do; in Boccaccio the tales never weary us, but the tellers always do. Just there we come upon the fundamental difference between English and what I may call perhaps Latin art. It is the same to-day as yesterday. In the work of D’ Annunzio, as in the work of the French novelists of our time, it is always an affair of situation, that is to say, the narrative or drama rises out of the situation, rather than out of the character of the actors, while even in the most worthless English work there is, as there has always been, an attempt at least to realise character, to make it the fundamental thing in the book, from which the narrative proceeds and by which it lives and is governed.

  In dealing with the Decameron, then, we must, more or less, leave the narrators themselves out of the question; they are not to be judged; they are but an excuse for the stories, and are really puppets who can in no way be held responsible for them, so that if now and then an especially licentious tale is told by one of those “virtuous” ladies, it is of no account, for the tales are altogether independent of those who tell them. But if these young and fair protagonists soon pass from our remembrance in the infinitely vivid and living stories they tell, yes, almost like a phonograph, the setting, the background of a plague-stricken and deserted city, the beauty and languorous peace of the delicious gardens in which we listen, always remain with us, so much so that tradition has identified the two palaces which are the setting of the whole Decameron with two of those villas which are the glory of the Florentine contado.

  The first of these palaces — that to which they came on that Wednesday morning — was, Boccaccio tells us, not more than “two short miles from the city” There “on the brow of the hill was a palace, with a fine and spacious courtyard in the midst, and with loggias and halls and rooms, all and each one in itself beautiful and ornamented tastefully with jocund paintings. It was surrounded too with grass plots and marvellous gardens, and with wells of coldest water, and there were cellars of rare wines, a thing perhaps more suited to curious topers than to quiet and vi
rtuous ladies. And the palace was clean and in good order, the beds prepared and made, and everything decorated with spring flowers, and the floors covered with rushes, all much to their satisfaction.” This “estate” has always been identified with Poggio Gherardo,659 which now stands above the road to Settignano, about a mile from that village and some two miles from the Porta alle Croce of Florence. In the fourteenth century certainly it must have been equi-distant on all sides from the roads, the nearest being the Via Aretina Nuova by the Arno and the road to Fiesole or the Via Faentina, for the way from Florence to Settignano was a mule-track.

  Poggio Gherardo is but a stone’s throw from Corbignano, the country house — half farm, half villa — which Margherita brought to Boccaccino as part of her dowry, and where, as we have seen, it appears likely that Boccaccio spent his first youth. But Poggio Gherardo is not the only palace of the Decameron. At the close of the second day Madonna Filomena took the laurel crown from her head and crowned Neifile queen, and it was she who then proposed that they should change their residence.

  “To-morrow, as you know,” said she, “is Friday, and the next day is Saturday, and both are days which are apt to be tedious to most of us on account of the kind of food we take on them; and then Friday was the day on which He who died that we might live suffered His Passion, and it is therefore worthy of reverence, and ought, as I think, to be spent rather in prayer than in telling tales. And on Saturday it is the custom for women to wash the powder out of their hair, and make themselves generally sweet and neat; also they use to fast out of reverence for the Virgin Mother of God, and in honour of the coming rest from any and every work. Therefore, since we cannot, on that day either, carry out our established order of life, I think it would be well to refrain from reciting tales also. And as by then we shall have been here already four days, I think we might seek a new place if we would avoid visitors; and indeed I have already a spot in my mind.”

  And it happened as she said, for they all praised her words and looked forward longingly to Sunday.

  On that very day the sun was already high when, “with slow steps, the queen with her friends and the three gentlemen, led by the songs of some twenty nightingales, took her way westward by an unfrequented lane full of green herbs and flowers just opening after the dawn. So, gossiping and playing and laughing with her company, she led them ... to a beautiful and splendid palace before half of the third hour was gone.” It is by this “unfrequented lane” that we too may pass to the Villa Palmieri,660 which tradition assures us is the very place. “When they had entered and inspected everything, and seen that the halls and rooms had been cleaned and decorated and plentifully supplied with all that was needed for sweet living, they praised its beauty and good order, and admired the owner’s magnificence. And on descending, even more delighted were they with the pleasant and spacious courts, the cellars filled with choice wines, and the beautifully fresh water which was everywhere round about. Then they went into the garden, which was on one side of the palace, and was surrounded by a wall, and the beauty and magnificence of it at first sight made them eager to examine it more closely. It was crossed in all directions by long, broad, and straight walks, over which the vines, which that year made a great show of giving many grapes, hung gracefully in arched festoons, and being then in full blossom, filled the whole garden with their sweet smell, and this, mingled with the odours of the other flowers, made so sweet a perfume that they seemed to be in the spicy gardens of the East. The sides of the walks were almost closed with red and white roses and with jessamine, so that they gave sweet odours and shade not only in the morning, but when the sun was high, and one might walk there all day without fear. What flowers there were there, how various and how ordered, it would take too long to tell, but there was not one which in our climate is to be praised that was not found there abundantly. Perhaps the most delightful thing therein was a meadow in the midst, of the finest grass, and all so green that it seemed almost black, all sprinkled with a thousand various flowers, shut in by oranges and cedars, the which bore the ripe fruit and the young fruit too and the blossom, offering a shade most grateful to the eyes and also a delicious perfume. In the midst of this meadow there was a fountain of the whitest marble, marvellously carved and within — I do not know whether artificially or from a natural spring — threw so much water and so high towards the sky through a statue which stood there on a pedestal that it would not have needed more to turn a mill. The water fell back again with a delicious sound into the clear waters of the basin, and the surplus was carried off through a subterranean way into little water channels, most beautifully and artfully made about the meadow, and afterwards it ran into others round about, and so watered every part of the garden, and collected at length in one place, whence it had entered the beautiful garden, it turned two mills, much to the profit, as you may suppose, of the signore, pouring down at last in a stream clear and sweet into the valley.”

  If this should seem a mere pleasaunce of delight, the vision of a poet, the garden of a dream, we have only to remember how realistically and simply Boccaccio has described for us that plague-stricken city, scarcely more than a mile away, to be assured of its truthfulness. And then, Villa Palmieri is nearly as beautiful to-day as it was so long ago; only while the gardens with their pergolas of vines, their hedges of jasmine and crimson roses, their carved marble fountains remain, the two mills he speaks of are gone, having been destroyed in a flood of the Mugnone in 1409, less than sixty years after he wrote of them.

  Nor are the two palaces the only places mentioned in the Decameron, set as it is in the country about Florence, that we may identify. It was a summer afternoon, six days had almost passed, Dioneo had just been crowned king by Madonna Elisa: the tales had been short that day, and the sun was yet high, so that Madonna, seeing the gentlemen were set down to play at dice (and “such is the custom of men”), called her friends to her and said: “‘Ever since we have been here I have wished to show you a place not far off where, I believe, none of you has ever been; it is called La Valle delle Donne, and till to-day I have not had a chance to speak of it. It is yet early; if you choose to come with me, I promise you that you will be pleased with your walk.’ And they answered they were all willing: so without saying a word to the gentlemen, they called one of their women to attend them, and after a walk of nearly a mile they came to the place which they entered by a strait path where there burst forth a fair crystal stream, and they found it so beautiful and so pleasant, especially in those hot still hours of afternoon, that nothing could excel it; and as some of them told me later, the little plain in the valley was an exact circle, as though it had been described by a pair of compasses, yet it was indeed rather the work of Nature than of man. It was about half a mile in circumference, surrounded by six hills of moderate height, on each of which was a palace built in the form of a little castle.... And then what gave them the greatest delight was the rivulet that came through a valley which divided two hills, and running through the rocks fell suddenly and sweetly in a waterfall seeming, as it was dashed and sprinkled in drops all about, like so much quicksilver. Coming into the little plain beneath this fall, the stream was received in a fine canal, and running swiftly to the midst of the plain formed itself in a pool not deeper than a man’s breast and so clear that you might see the gravelly bottom and the pebbles intermixed, which indeed you might count; and there were fishes there also swimming up and down in great plenty; and the water that overflowed was received into another little canal which carried it out of the valley. There the ladies all came together, and ... finding it commendable ... did, as ’twas very hot and they deemed themselves secure from observation, resolve to take a bath. So having bidden their maid wait and keep watch over the access to the vale, and give them warning if haply any should approach it, they all seven undressed and got into the water, which to the whiteness of their flesh was even such a veil as fine glass is to the vermeil of the rose.661 They being then in the water, the clearness of which was
thereby in no wise affected, did presently begin to go hither and thither after the fish, which had much ado where to bestow themselves so as to escape out of their hands.... ’Twas quite early when they returned to the palace, so that they found the gallants still at play.”

  This delicious spot, called to this day the Valle delle Donne,662 may be reached from the “unfrequented lane” by which they all passed from Poggio Gherardo to Villa Palmieri; as Landor, who lived close by, tells us: —

  “Where the hewn rocks of Fiesole impend

  O’er Doccia’s dell, and fig and olive blend,

  There the twin streams of Affrico unite,