Completed approximately thirty years after the Commedia, Boccaccio’s Decameron intends a secular, early modern critique (and even send-up) of Dante’s visionary epic. Rather than prophetic bombast against Florence’s merchants of “nuovi guadagni,” this “mercantile epic” embraces the stock characters, pragmatic values, wit, savvy, romance, and racy humor valued by Florence’s cosmopolitan bourgeosie and their novella tradition. The cento novelle reflect those indigenous values and traditions, but also embrace, as a part of the tradition, wider-ranging stories of trade, travel, politics and piracy set within the actual pan-Mediterranean urban network of exchange, from Genova to Alexandria of Egypt, from Armenia to Sicily, from Marseilles to Cyprus and Crete. Our study will seek to understand how Boccaccio represents the Mediterranean as a mobile and hybrid space of knowledge exchange, within a similarly mobile and hybrid fictive space, the storytelling competition of the brigata. We will consider how, within this dialogue of tales, new values and prospects are formed: who travels and why; whether and if/how their travels change them; if/how these tales transform earlier versions; how comedy or tragedy function; how ideas and beliefs from the Eastern Mediterranean enter into tales set in Italy or Western Europe, and how the politics of trade, war, and piracy emerge from this network of stories.



Required Texts: G. Boccaccio. Decameron, a cura di V. Branca. 2 Voll. Torino: Einaudi, 2005. ISBN [EAN] -9788806177027. Boccaccio geografo. A cura di R. Morosini. Firenze: Mauro Pagliai Editore [Polistampa], 2010. ISBN [EAN]-9788856401028. F. Cardini, Il grande blu. Il Mediterraneo, mare di tesori: avventure, sogni, commerci, battaglie, Prefazione di G. Bonini. A cura di D.