This, as we have seen, is the third poem which Boccaccio wrote in ottave, and it has been stated, not without insistence, that he was in fact the inventor, or at any rate the renewer, of that metre in Italian.[304]
The truth seems to lie with Baldelli. The Sicilians had written ottave, but they had but two rime, and were akin to those of the Provençals. What Boccaccio did was to take this somewhat arid scheme and give it life by reforming it out of all recognition. Moreover, if he was not actually the first poet to write ottave in Italian, he was the first to put them to epic use. There are in fact, properly speaking, no Italian epics before the poems of Boccaccio.
As for the Ninfale Fiesolano, it was first published in Venice in 1477 by Bruno Valla and Tommaso d' Alessandria. It has only been translated once—into French—by Anton Guercin du Crest, who published it in Lyons in 1556 at the shop of Gabriel Cotier. This was apparently the last poem on which Boccaccio was engaged—though it may have been put aside for the sake of the Fiammetta, and taken up again—before, about 1344, it seems, he returned to Naples.
[CHAPTER VI]
1341-1343
IN FLORENCE—HIS FATHER'S SECOND MARRIAGE—THE DUKE OF ATHENS
Those years which Boccaccio spent in Florence between 1341 and 1345, and which would seem for the most part to have been devoted to literature, the completion of the works already begun in Naples, the composition of the Amorosa Visione, the Fiammetta, and the Ninfale Fiesolano, were personally among the most unhappy of his life, while publicly they brought the republic of Florence to the verge of ruin. And indeed he was an unwilling victim. That he hated leaving Naples might seem obvious from his own circumstances at that time; nor were the political conditions of Florence encouraging. He had left a city friendly to men of letters, full of all manner of splendour, rich, peaceful, and, above all, governed by one authority, the king, for a distracted republic divided against itself and scarcely able to support a costly foreign war.[305] Nor were the conditions of his father's house any more pleasing to him.
Soured by misfortune, Boccaccino seems at this time to have been a melancholy and hard old man. The picture Giovanni gives us of him is perhaps coloured by resentment, and indeed he had never forgiven his father for the desertion of the girl he had seduced, the little French girl Jeanne, Giovanni's mother;[306] but it is with a quite personal sense of resentment he describes the home to which he returned from Naples—that house in the S. Felicità quarter which Boccaccino had bought in 1333:[307] "Here one laughs but seldom. The dark, silent, melancholy house keeps and holds me altogether against my will, where the dour and terrible aspect of an old man frigid, uncouth, and miserly continually adds affliction to my saddened mood."[308] That was in 1341 one may think; and no doubt the loss of Fiammetta, his own poverty, and the confusion of public affairs in Florence added to his depression; and then he was always easily cast down. But as it happened, things were already improving for him.