A course on Mediterranean Boccaccio originates from the awareness that a culture and its visual and literary texts cannot be considered without taking into account the context that generated them. The context we consider in this class is the culture of the Mediterranean in the XIII and XIV centuries, namely the cultural, commercial and intellectual exchanges through the Mare Nostrum. The course aims to follow the path of what can be considered 'Mediterranean' in the Decameron starting from a study of the representation of the cities and in particular of the city of Naples, one of the Mediterranean cities most loved by Boccaccio. In this course students will be introduced to a reading of Boccaccio's texts with a particular focus on the Decameron, a literary, social and cultural

observatory of Italy in XIV Century. The approach is both philological, as a 'direct' access to the Italian texts, and cultural by means of contextualizing them in the literary and social setting that generated them. The first part of this course aims to locate Boccaccio within Mediterranean culture by looking at the role of Florence with Naples and France and the relationship Boccaccio had with the Florentine Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Grand Seneschal of the Angevin Kingdom in Naples, not to mention the impact that the Southern city had on Boccaccio. Messina, Palermo and Venezia will also be considered. The second part of the course is the actual reading of Boccaccio's texts and it progressively follows the themes of the Decameron.

°The credit for this course can also be used for the M.A. in Mediterranean Studies



Required Texts: G. Boccaccio, Decameron, a cura di V. Branca, Torino, Einaudi, 2005, ISBN-9788806177027

2 Voll. (students are required to bring a copy of this edition).

F. Bruni, Boccaccio e l'invezione della letteratura mezzana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1990, ISBN-88-15-02479-4

R. Morosini, Bocaccio Geografo, ISBN-978-88-564-0102-8.