In Search of Dante, Gemma, and Boccaccio
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Sprache:Englisch
Fr. 5.00
inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Format
ePUB
Kopierschutz
Ja
Family Sharing
Ja
Text-to-Speech
Ja
Erscheinungsdatum
03.05.2026
Verlag
Aguilar PressSeitenzahl
(Printausgabe)
Dateigröße
403 KB
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9798235596900
His junior by half a century, Boccaccio was obsessed with Dante all his life. After mocking the poeta divina's dogmatism, he wrote his first biography and, shortly before his death, delivered lectures in praise of the Inferno. Here we follow Boccaccio's search for Italy's national poet and his wife Gemma whom Dante, while heaping praise on Beatrice, never mentions with a single word.
Though Boccaccio didn't know Dante in person, he found out about him with the help of Beatrice's distant cousin Lippa, of Dante's widow, his ghostly doppelgänger Andrea, and Florence's chronicler Giovanni Villani: the young Dante, smarting under the foul-mouthed parodies of his early poems by gadflies like Cecco Angolieri and Dante da Maiano; or suffering the slurs of former best friend Guido Cavalcanti, who suddenly called him vile; then, for a short while before being banished from Florence, the devoted father of his three children with Gemma. Boccaccio also learnt about Dante as an epileptic possessed by a demon, full of doubts about the existence of God and of fears that he might be eternally damned while still going about his daily routines. Gemma told him how her husband at night clung to her, never in orgasmic delight, but in utter despair a haunted man who wrote his greatest works on the run from Florence, which had sentenced him to be burnt at the stake if he'd return.
In the process, we also get to know Boccaccio, studying the art of love under Neapolitan femme fatale Fiammetta, then back in Florence, basking in the adulation of numerous upper-class ladies. Some of these enjoyed the double pleasure of seeing what they 'd told him about their lives resurface in his poems and novellas, while also relishing the amorous attentions of their discrete though promiscuous lover. Long after Dante's death, we find Boccaccio navigate the horrors of the Great Plague which killed many of his friends, relatives, and lovers, including the young wife of his father Boccaccino. After a life tirelessly producing works, which more than anyone's, opened up the splendours of the Renaissance, he died, much like Dante, in fear of being damned for the carnal sins he had committed while alive.
Mixing fantasy with fact, this historical novel is based on solid research, while giving a colourful and often hilarious account of an era on the brink of Modernity.
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