Amorosa visione
Mundane triumph
The influence of Dante’s Divine Commedy is all the more evident in the Amorosa visione or Amorous vision, composed in the same period as the Ameto, in 1342-43.
This is an allegorical poem in tercets, subdivided in fifty cantos and preceded by three tailed sonnets, modulated by the initial letters of each tercet, in such a way as to make of the whole work a spectacular acrostic.
The main character of the tale is Boccaccio, actor-author of Dantean recollection, to whom a kindly lady appears in a dream, who takes him to a noble castle. The poet and his guide here visit two halls with frescoed walls. In the first are portrayed the great human appetites (Wisdom, Fame, Wealth, Love); the second is instead entirely dedicated to Fortune and is used as the occasion for an erudite and doctrinal digression.
Each abstract entity has its train of historic, literary and mythological celebrities. So Wisdom is surrounded by philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Averroes, Boezio etc.), poets (Virgil, Homer, Horace, Lucan, Ovid, Juvenal, Terence, Stazio, Claudianus, Dante etc.), and historians (Sallustius, Livio, Valerius Maximus, Paolo Orosio). Around the Chariot of Glory we find personalities from the classical and the courtly world, as well as medieval political figures (Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick II, Manfredi, Corradino, Charles of Anjou). Amongst the miserly depicted upon the third wall there are Midas, Attila, and Nero, but also people close to Boccaccio, like Robert of Anjou and his father Boccaccino. The triumph of love is celebrated with famous couples of lovers, such as Piramus and Thisbe, Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, Aeneas and Dido, Lancelot and Guinevere, Florio and Biancifiore. Once having completed the tour of the palace, Boccaccio is taken to a garden, full of noble and comely ladies, amongst which is Fiammetta, the lady to whom the work was dedicated. The poet goes to his beloved and, whilst he tries to have her, he awakes. His guide warns him that happiness, which he had thought he had found, must be reached through a different route, which one accesses through the narrow door of virtue, which, at the start to the adventure, the poet had refused to enter.
