Boccaccismo veneto di primo Cinquecento: gli "accidenti d'amore" di Giovanni Brevio

The essay deals with the figure of Giovanni Brevio, a Venetian intellectual of excellent culture and good acquaintances. A friend of Gian Giorgio Trissino and Pietro Bembo, Brevio was in relationship with some of the most celebrated personalities of his time, and precisely in view of his average level he is an interesting case for the way in which he approached the reflections about the earlier vernacular tradition that at the time were being elaborated in the Venetian milieu. A connoisseur of the classics and the Florentine crowns, which he intensively studied (as his marginal notes show), Brevio did not strictly follow in his own writing the stylistic and linguistic choices derived from his models, in particular from Bembo’s theory. In his edition of the Rime et prose volgari (1545) the sound Petrarchist structure of the lyrics is accompanied by some prose novellas. This study focuses on a group of tales of amorous subject matter and almost always of Venetian setting, with the aim to show how the Boccaccian revival is marked by a strong taste for triviality, barely cloaked by an allegedly exemplary intent, and by a distinctive way of employing a Venetian scenery.