Matteo Silvatico

Matteo Silvatico(1245-1342), doctor of Roberto d’Angiò, king of Naples, brings the fame of the Medical School in the century of Boccaccio, who will be his friend and who will portray him in a novella, the X of the 4th day, under the name of Mazzeo della Montagna:“You have to know beautiful young people – writes Boccaccio, telling his warm youth -, that it is still not long that in Salerno was a great doctor in the cirugia, whose name was master Mazzeo della Montagna, who, already at the last near old age, having taken for wife a beautiful and genuine young man of his city”.

Matteo therefore is an important character, Boccaccio does not make him make a beautiful figure in the novella, treating him as a hornet, but we know the spirit of the great Tuscan. Actually, horns aside, Matteo is author of important texts that will be transcribed and then printed in the 16th century, among all the Opus Pandectarum Medicina: a scientific treatise on herbs and their use in the medical field.

Of the herbs in fact Matteo was a great expert, so great from having founded that Garden of the Minerva still today visitable and organized according to the principles of medicine of Galeno, then resumed in the Middle Ages andtaught at Schola Medica Salernitana. The simple, i.e. plants and shrubs fundamental for the preparation of drugs, were cultivated to compensate for diseases, which according to the medicine of then indicated embalms between the humors and therefore diseases. The medicines were intended to compensate for the shocks and restore balance.