Masuccio Salernitano

Masuccio SalernitanoOf course,most famous literary city. In a Salerno of the Quattrcento reborn to trade and business, Masuccio isstoryteller of facts and characters often linked to the business world, famous doctors, to places still recognizable. Masuccio Salernitano (Tommaso Guardati), seems to have been born around 1410 in Salerno.

The Salernitan birth of Masuccio is attested first by the appellation he gave, from the continuous references to Salerno as his city, in which he also spent adolescence and youth, beginning his first studies. He then went to Naples with some transitory assignment, which allowed him to be known and appreciated by King Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria, by his wife Ippolita Maria Visconti and earned him the friendship of the greatest humanists of the Aragonese court, and among them Giovanni Pontano, who dedicated to Masuccio after his death a significant epitaph.

Around 1440 he married Cristina de Pandis, from whom he had five children, returned to Salerno as secretary of Prince Roberto of Sanseverino and died here in 1475.

Masuccio isauthor of only Novellino, book composed of 50 novels from which you know the themes of the Author: hismoralism, often pushed to the extreme, and itsrealism all rational. Even in the newest thrust towards the grotesque or truce, never the Masuccio indulges in irrational disguises or in fantastic or magical explanations. The realism of Masuccio brings the settings of his novels to many parts of Italy and the world, with precise references, almost never casual. And when he speaks of the cities he knows directly, he sets the novels in recognizable, well-known places, and makes him preferring a stylistic choice.In Naples in fact are set the novelle of type cortigiano and amoroso, and this city is therefore the scene of sentimental events, in a noble and court background.

Salerno instead is the city of markets and business: already the prologue is set in its city and the action takes place in Drapparia, today Via dei Mercanti:“In the time of the happy and illustrated record of Queen Margarita was in this nominated city a very rich Genoese merchant (…). So he walked one day in front of his bench in a street called Drapparia, where there were many other benches and workshops of silversmiths and tailors” (Novellino, prologo). “In the years that our Salernitana city under the imperio of the glorious pontiff Martin fifth stood, in it of great treacherous if they do, and endless wonders of continuous and every nation concur. ” (novella XII). Again: “In the time that between Naples and the castella proudly if it was warrior, in Salerno more than in another part of the realm used merchants of every nation; (…)(novel XL).

City of merchants and doctors, Salerno is described and therefore of bourgeoisie. And in fact the XIV novella is dedicated “Iacobo Solimena Fisico salernitano”, and therefore thetradition ofMedical SchoolIt lasted in the years of Masuccio, along with the memory of the Opulenta Civitas of the Lombard era.

There are other Salernitane novelles (the XIII: “Ascari Pandolfo vene stratified in Salerno; tolle muglie and badly treated in bed(…). The XX “It was already a few years ago that in Salerno he was a young man called Iacomo Pinto, who at well that he was of the seat of Portanova, where communamente we hold the senno of our city, to him would have been more precisely and convenient to play for his room our village of Monte, in which they say to be the maiore part of the wrinkle of our antiquis”, there are novels with protagonists (XVI “San Bernardino is deceived by dui salernitani“).

We like to conclude this description of the new Salernitane with a long quotation, which helps us, not so much to frame specific geographical places but places of the spirit of Masuccio, “The Cava, a fine city that was very fidelissima, and novamente in part divantata nobile, was always abundantly provided by the singular moraturi and tesseturi masters, whose art or true mistieri they had done so well, that in cash dinars and other mobile goods were in manera arriccati, that for all our kingdom was not reasoned of other reckliness than those of’. That if the children had seized the vestiges of their fathers, and went behind the footsteps of their ancestors, they would not be redeemed in that extreme poverty and fore de mesura, in which they are already present. But they were disregarding the riches acquired in such a laborious mixer. and when he saw goods of fortune and transient having nothing, following the vertù and nobility como things incommutable and perpetual, univerally they were given to devontare lawists and doctors and notaries, and other armigers, and what knights, so that there is no house niuna, which, first of all that artillery to be weaving and to be dark,” (novella XIX)

If you dedicate yourself to work, business, industry, a city can grow and flourish, even culturally, if you devote yourself to activities without ties to hard work, then trouble begins. So Masuccio thinks it, and maybe he doesn’t have all the twists.