Masuccio Salernitano

Masuccio Salernitano is certainly the city’s most famous man of letters. In a fourteenth-century Salerno reborn to commerce and business, Masuccio is a narrator of facts and characters often related to business, famous doctors, and places still recognizable. Masuccio Salernitano (Tommaso Guardati), seems to have been born around 1410 in Salerno. Masuccio’s Salerno birth is attested first of all by the appellation he gave himself, by the constant references to Salerno as his city, where he also spent his adolescence and youth, beginning his early studies. He then went to Naples on a few transitory assignments, which enabled him to be known and appreciated by King Ferdinand, the duke of Calabria, his wife Ippolita Maria Visconti and earned him the friendship of the leading humanists of the Aragonese court, and among them Giovanni Pontano, who dedicated a significant epitaph to Masuccio after his death.
Around 1440 he married Cristina de Pandis, by whom he had five children, returned to Salerno as secretary to Prince Robert of Sanseverino, and died here in 1475.
Masuccio is the author of only the Novellino, a book consisting of 50 novellas from which we know the author’s themes: his moralism, often pushed to the extreme, and his all-rational realism. Even in the novellas that are more pushed toward the grotesque or truer, never does Masuccio indulge in irrational caveats or fantastic or magical explanations. Masuccio’s realism takes the settings of his novellas to many parts of Italy and the world, with precise references that are almost never accidental. And when he speaks of the cities he knows directly, he sets the novelle in recognizable, well-known places, and he does so by favoring a stylistic choice. In fact, the novellas of the courtly and amorous type are set in Naples, and this city is therefore the scene of sentimental events, against a background of nobility and court.
Salerno, on the other hand, is the city of markets and business: already the prologue is set in its city and the action takes place in the Drapparia, today’s Via dei Mercanti: “in the time of the happy and illustrious record of Queen Margarita there was in this appointed city a very rich Genoese merchant (…). He therefore strolled one day in front of his stall placed in a street called the Drapparia, where there were many other stalls and stores of silversmiths and tailors” (Novellino, prologue).And again, “In the years that our city of Salerno under the reign of the glorious pontiff Martin the Fifth was governed, in it de greatest trafichi se facano, e mercanzie infinissimi de continuo e d’ogni nazione vi concorrenano.” (novella XII). Again, “In the time that between Naples and the castles fiercely if warfare was waged, in Salerno more than in any other part of the kingdom merchants of every nation used; (…)” (novella XL).
A city of merchants and doctors, Salerno is described and thus of the bourgeoisie. And in fact the XIV novella is dedicated “to the most prestantissimo messere Iacobo Solimena Fisico salernitano,” and thus the tradition of the Medical School lasted in Masuccio’s years, along with the memory of the Opulenta Civitas of the Lombard era.
There are other Salerno novellas (the 13th: “Pandolfo d’Ascari vene straticò a Salerno; tolle muglie e male la tratta a letto (…);” The XX “It is already a few years past, that in Salerno was a young man called Iacomo Pinto, who to well that fusse del seggio de Portanova, ove communamente tenemo il senno della de la nostra città, to him would have been more proper and convenient luoco per sua stanza our paese del Monte, in which they say is the maiore parte de la rugine de’ nostri antiqui,” there are novelle with Salernitani protagonists (XVI “San Bernardino è ingannato da dui salernitani”).
I like to conclude this description of the Salerno novelle with a long quote, which helps us, not so much to frame specific geographical places but places of Masuccio’s spirit,
“La Cava, città multo antiqua fidelissima, e novamente in parte divantata nobile, fu sempre abundantemente fornita de singulari maestri moraturi e tesseturi, de la cui arte o vero mistieri loro v’era così bene avvenuta, che in dinari contanti e altri beni mobili erano in manera arriccati, che per tutto ‘l’nostro regno non si ragionava d’altra recchezza che de quelle de’ caùti. So that if the children had followed the vestiges of their fathers, and had gone in the footsteps of their ancestors, they would not have been reduced to that extreme poverty and lack of measure, in which they are already at present. But they were despising the riches acquired in such laborious misery. e qulle como a beni de la fortuna e transitorii avendo a nulla, sequendo la vertù e nobiltà como cose incommutabili e perpetue, univeralmente si sono dato a deventareno legisti e medici e notari, e altri armigeri, e quali cavalieri, per modo tale che non vi è casa niuna, che, dove prima altro che artigliaria da tessere e da morare non vi se trovava, adesso, per scambio de quelle, staffs, speroni e centure indorate in ogne lato vi se vedeno.” (novella XIX)
If one devotes oneself to work, to business, to industry, a city can grow and make itself prosperous, even culturally; if one devotes oneself to activities with no connection to hard work, then trouble begins. This is how Masuccio thinks, and perhaps he has a point.