Nel mare del mito: la “Genealogia deorum gentilium” di Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium is a Latin mythographic encyclopaedia built in a complex architecture of thirteen books with the genealogical relations between the pagan gods plus two methodological books (XIV and XV) with a poetry defence and a defence of the author himself. Every book is connected to the other in a cohesive and coherent system through the metaphor of the sea voyage, which is introduced by the preface to the first book, and which is then resumed at the beginning of each subsequent chapter. The metaphor of the work as a sea voyage has a clear classical tradition behind it but takes on peculiar connotations in Boccaccio’s work: on one hand, we can recognize both Dante and Petrarch texts underneath it (particularly interesting is the association with Dedalus’ flight), on the other, this imagery assumes an innovative and structural value: the chronological criterion is – for the first time in a work like this – deeply linked to the spatial one, according to the periplus strategy used in geographical texts recently returned into circulation.