Today we read Amato figlio, or che la dolce vista, by Faustina Maratti Zappi.

Faustina Maratti was said to be quite the beauty — so much so that a noble suitor, after her repeated refusals, tried to kidnap her. Out of that adventure he got a harsh sentence, while she got both a prominent scar and a heroic reputation.

She was an established poet, being a member of the famous Accademia dell’Arcadia — one of whose founders would eventually become her husband.

Their life together was apparently very happy, their house a literary hub of those years. One great sorrow was, however, the death of their first child, at the tender age of two. In this sonnet she tries to reconcile her faith with her natural, motherly pain at his loss.

She is supposed to be happy because her son is now blissfully in the presence of God, but she is worried that her grief is excessive, impious, and will lead her son to think less of her and love her less.

The original:

Today we read La tigre assenza, by Cristina Campo.

Cristina Campo was a sickly child, homeschooled, and grew to be very shy and reserved. She always had a very close relationship with her parents, both successful artists.

The subtitle of this excruciating poem is “pro patre et matre,” which in Latin means “for father and mother.” In it, the pain of their death and their absence from her life is likened to a tiger that devoured every part of her, except her mouth, so the only thing she can now do is to pray.

The original:

Today we read Intorno ad una fonte, in un pratello, by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Boccaccio’s fame is tightly linked to his collection of novels, il Decamerone — especially so in English speaking countries, where he is recognized as a fundamental model for Chaucer’s The Canterbury’s Tales.

But Boccaccio was also a poet. He loved Dante, he admired his friend Petrarca. He certainly appreciated the Dolce stil novo poetry, paradigmatic at the time, which extolled love for a woman as a means to get closer to God.

And yet his poetry can be much less… pious. This is the first poem in his collection Rime, and as such it sets the tone for the entire work. It starts with an almost stock description of a locus amoenus: a pleasant natural setting; beautiful, refined ladies discoursing about love; a liberal use of diminutives (all those nouns ending in -ello or -etto).

But the sestina turns the rarefied setting on its head with a light touch of irony and a naughty smile. One of the ladies asks if they would run away, should one of their lovers arrive — presumably to behave like “proper ladies.” But the other two answer saying, basically, “are you crazy? Of course we wouldn’t!”

The original: