I imagine the ideal way in which to read Giovanni Boccaccio’s profane and earthy 14th-century classic is to be ensconced for a sweltering summer at the Villa Schifanoia. There you would have a small but elegant room overlooking the Tuscan hillsides whose winding roads are lined with those tall and preposterously skinny trees, while evenings would be given over to feasts in the yellow-walled courtyard where you dine on cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto cut to a near-translucent pinkness, pappardelle with fresh pesto studded with garlic and pine-nuts, and a thick cut of charred and marbled ribeye whose interior is as luridly crimson as a muscular human heart. All of this, obviously, is to be whetted with thimblefuls of grappa and multiple fiascos of chianti.
“Much have I eaten, much have I drank, and much have I mocked mankind”—that’s not Boccaccio, it’s the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos some two millennia before but their worldviews are identical. Boccaccio’s is that Mediterranean disposition which despite some unfortunate contraries (Savonarola, Campanella, etc.) tends to eschew millenarianism and utopianism in favor of the tangible and material, where one should be content to tend to one’s own vineyard.
What the author expresses, argues Massimo Riva in his contribution to is the subversive “erotic charge of popular Mediterranean culture,” of the richness in the “Florentine vernacular world” which extends into the “Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Pugli.