The Epistole: Sparse fragments of an existence

Boccaccio’s epistolary activity is testified to a modest twenty five letters, written between 1339 and 1374[1]. The fact that the writer never chose to keep his correspondence in an organised form could be one of the reasons why so few documents have reached posterity, whilst the many references to letters indicate that there were many more. The first four dictamina of 1339, included in the  Zibaldone Laurenziano XXIX 8, are to be considered rhetoric exercises. Of his correspondence with Petrarch only letters VII, X, XI and XV have survived. From these missives we can see that their exchanges went well beyond literary communication and included the personal sphere. This is testified to by a famous passage in Ep. XV of metricconverter ProductID="1367, in" w:st="on">1367, in which Boccaccio presents a moving portrait of Petrarch’s little granddaughter, Eletta, upon which he projects his own daughter Violante, who died in1355 at the tender age of five.

His grief at Petrarch’s death can be clearly seen in the letter he wrote to Francesco da Brossano in 1374. Boccaccio confesses his total admiration (“nemo mortalium me magis illi fuit obnoxius”. Ep. XXIV: 1) confirming the eulogistic portrait of the poet from Rieti, already visible in the Mavortis milex and the De Vita. The writer became progressively more and more ill in the last five years of his life. It is in this period that he entertained correspondence with the Neapolitan humanists (Ep. XVIII, to Niccolò Orsini and XIX, to Iacopo Pizzinga of 1371; Ep. XX to Pietro di Monteforte of 1372). From Ep. XXI, sent to his friend Mainardo Cavalcanti in 1373, emerges a picture of strong physical and psychological depression, which leads  Boccaccio to desire death (“mortem cupio”).

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[1]Epistles and letters, ed. G. Auzzas, in All the works of Giovanni Boccaccio. ed. V. Branca, vol. 5.1, Milan 1992, p. 724.