According to top-mba-universities, the literature of chivalry, which began in French or Franco-Venetian in the Marca Trevisana and migrated to Tuscany at the beginning of the fourteenth century (we recalled on page 934 the Fioravante and the Riccardian Tristan for example of simple and straightforward prose), continued with a luxuriant flowering of poems in octaves and prose stories in central Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Then there were poems for the Carolingian cycle such as Spain , the Uggeri the Danese , the Fierabraccia , the Aspromonte , and prose novels, such as a story by Buovo d’Antona, the Stories of Rinaldo , the Journey of Charlemagne in Spain and, more famous and more vital for a long time (they are reprinted and read again), I Reali di Francia , a vast cyclical novel by Andrea di Iacopo da Barberino in Valdelsa. For the Breton cycle, perhaps more pleasing to the knights and ladies of the courts than to the common people, prosastic translations of French novels, and poems and poems on Febusso the strong , on Lancilotto , on Tristan , and others, such as Gismirante and the Historia della Reina d’Oriente by Antonio Pucci already mentioned, in which Breton fables are freely reworked and transferred to characters other than the primitive protagonists. With which last poems, things extraneous to art and yet easily susceptible of classification, one enters the genre of versified short stories, which many left us in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some composed of plebeian storytellers, such as the Istoria di Ottinello and Giulia and that of Campriano peasant , and others by more cultured verseurs, such as the story of Maria per Ravenna or the reduction in octaves of Ghismunda’s Boccaccesca novella made by the Florentine Girolamo Benivieni.
But more than in similar versifications, Boccaccio’s novellistic tradition continued in several collections, which, far from the Decameron in artistic evidence , remember him for the frame in which the novellas are framed and for a certain sustained style, which is almost always awkwardness and sometimes arrembata ungrammatical. About fifty short stories, the most historical, are told coldly in the twenty-five days of the Pecorone by a ser Giovanni Fiorentino. One hundred and fifty five imagines to tell a traveling brigade about Italy in 1374 to escape the plague, the apothecary from Lucca Giovanni Seicambi; which, if it were true, would give pride of great patience to that brigade, so much is the story lacking in spirit and such is the asthma of periods in vain yearning for fulfillment. Less Boccaccio is the fifteenth-century Sienese Gentile Sermini, who rarely constructs complex short stories and mostly loves simple and crude tales told with annoying prolixity and coarse vulgarity. Dull narrator of anecdotes, jokes, joking mottos is Sabbadino delli Arienti, whose collection, the Porretane , composed in 1478, is slightly later than Novellino by Tommaso Guardati, known as Masuccio Salernitano, printed in 1476. This is a collection of fifty short stories, which take up traditional motifs with the intent of delighting, teaching and satirizing, and are grouped into five parts, while one moralizing closure connects each short story to the next. Weak in the figuration of characters, Masuccio has some effectiveness in the representation of the scenes and in the development of actions.
With better delight than these and other Boccaccio imitations (novels, such as the Paradiso degli Alberti by Giovanni Gherardi da Prato of the early fifteenth century and the Peregrino by Iacopo Caviceo of the extreme; dialogues and epistles modeled on the Fiammetta ), one reads the short stories of Franco Sacchetti composed in the last two decades of the century. XIV and narrated in good faith, in the living Florentine idiom; mostly simple and witty anecdotes effectively representative of contemporary reality. Of a slightly different type are some fifteenth-century short stories, such as that of the Grasso carpenter, perhaps by Antonio Manetti, and that of Giacoppo, who may bear the name of the Magnificent.
Rhymes and prose are also the historical tales of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: mostly in octaves the popular ones intended for acting, such as the seven cantari of the Pisa war of 1362 by Antonio Pucci and the eleven already attributed to Niccolò Ciminello from Abruzzo on the war of ‘Aquila (1424); mostly in triplets those intended for reading, such as the Centiloquio by Pucci himself, metric reduction of the chronicle of Villani, and The other Mars. in which the Perugian Lorenzo Gualtieri called Lorenzo Spirito sang the facts of the three Piccinini up to the battle of Troia (1460). Naturally, chronicles in vulgar prose or, what is the same, Latin in the medieval style abound, alien to any effort of synthesis, without any other order than the chronological. There is no city that does not have at least one; but deprived as they are, not only of any value but of any literary intention, they do not require that we speak of them here. It is only necessary to remember, as one of the greatest prose writers of the fifteenth century, Giovanni Cavalcanti, who in narrating the changes in the state from 1423 to 1440 with a Medici spirit, showed that he had an unusually broad and penetrating conception of the facts, which earned him the honor to be the source of Machiavelli, and the facts were sometimes able to represent in powerful pages. Lives of illustrious men parade in front of us a solemn group of popes, prelates, princes, writers, Italian and foreign statesmen, directly known, most of all, by the good Florentine bookseller and represented by him with a wealth of picturesque details, in a usually simple and plain, sometimes tinged with good-natured wit.
