CHAPTER HEADING FROM THE "DECAMERON." (VENICE, 1492)
The sources of the Fiammetta are hard and perhaps impossible to trace. It seems to have no forbears.[295] One thinks of Ovid's Heroides, but that has little to do with it. Among the minor works of Boccaccio it is the one that has been most read. First published in Padova in 1472, it was translated into English in 1587 by B. Young.[296]
From this intense psychological novel Boccaccio seems to have turned away with a sort of relief, the relief the poet always finds in mere singing, to the Ninfale Fiesolano. Licentious, and yet full of a marvellous charm, full of that love of nature, too, which is by no means a mere convention, the Ninfale Fiesolano is the most mature of his poems in the vulgar tongue.
"Basterebbe," says Carducci,[297] "Basterebbe, io credo, il Ninfale Fiesolano perchè non fosse negato al Boccaccio l' onore di poeta anche in versi." It was probably begun about 1342 in Florence, and finished in Naples in 1346. The theme is still love:
"Amor mi fa parlar che m' è nel core
Gran tempo stato e fatto m' ha suo albergo,"
he tells us in the first lines. The story tells how the shepherd Affrico falls in love with Mensola, nymph of Diana,[298] and how the nymph, penitent for having broken her vow of chastity, abandons the poor shepherd.[299] In desperation, Affrico kills himself on the bank of the brook that has witnessed their happiness and that is now called Affrico after him;[300] and Mensola, after bearing a son, is changed too into the stream Mensola hard by.[301] Pruneo, their offspring, when he is eighteen years old, enters the service of Atlas, founder of Fiesole, who marries him to Tironea. She receives as dote the country between the Mensola and the Mugnone.[302]
The sources he drew from for this beautiful poem, so full of learning, but fuller still of a genuine love of nature, prove to us that it was, in its completeness, a mature work. It is derived in part from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, from the Æneid, and from Achilles Tatius, a Greek romancer of Alexandria who lived in the fifth century a.d.[303] Moreover, the Ninfale is a pastoral poem that is in no way at all concerned with chivalry; it is wholly Latin, full of nature and the bright fields, expressed with a Latin rhetoric. Curiously enough it has never had much success, especially out of Italy; and though it be voluptuous, it is by no means the immoral book it has been called.