The Italian Renaissance

An exiled Florentine poet decided to tell in the vernacular a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise, and thereby founded literary Italian. Around the Divine Comedy everything Europe would call humanism took shape: Petrarch invented the love canzoniere and the reading of the Ancients, Boccaccio shut ten young people fleeing the plague and had them tell a hundred stories, Ariosto and Tasso carried chivalric epic to its height, Castiglione described what a man of the court should be.

works 7

• PoetryThe Divine ComedyLa Divina CommediaDante Alighieri · 1321A poem in one hundred cantos in which a living man travels through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided by Virgil and then by Beatrice.Literature
• Short storiesThe DecameronIl DecameronBoccaccio · 1353One hundred tales told over ten days by ten young Florentines who have taken refuge in the countryside during the plague.Literature
• PoetryThe CanzoniereIl CanzonierePetrarch · 1374A collection of love poems in the vernacular, composed over forty years around the figure of Laura.Literature
• EssayThe Book of the CourtierIl CortegianoBaldassare Castiglione · 1528A Renaissance dialogue in which courtiers at Urbino seek to define the accomplished man of the court.LiteraturePublic domain
• EpicOrlando FuriosoOrlando furiosoLudovico Ariosto · 1532A chivalric epic in which Charlemagne's war against the Saracens mingles with love affairs and enchantments.LiteraturePublic domain
• EpicJerusalem DeliveredLa Gerusalemme liberataTorquato Tasso · 1581An epic of the First Crusade in which holy war is mingled with enchantments and love affairs.Literature
• PoetrySongbookIl CanzoniereUmberto Saba · 1921A collection spanning a poet's life, constantly revised, in which Trieste holds pride of place.Literature