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Specialist Notes
THE MOST INSPIRED AUTHOR OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, whose inventions immediately penetrated France, with Launay's translations and Belleforest, and, through French mediation, in England, with the versions and reductions of Painter and Fenton, as well as in Spain, in the original and translated, and offered ideas and schemes to the playwrights of the Elizabethan age ( Shakespeare, Webster, Marston), to the comedies of Lope de Vega, to the short stories of Cervantes. An immense fortune from beyond the Alps rather than from Italy. The complete original edition of the 4 books is very rare.
"The collection of short stories is not only B.'s largest and most long-developed work, but also the one in which all aspects of his creativity are best reflected personality: a vast and varied experience of the world, gained in the long practice of the courts, in private negotiations and in diplomatic maneuvers, in frequenting the camps, but seen above all in the "worldly" perspective par excellence, precisely of those salons where "the most high and beautiful minds"...The short stories are 214 in total, distributed in four parts, of which the first three, published in 1554 by the author, have an almost equal extension, while the fourth, published posthumously in 1573 , collects less copious and perhaps less elaborate material.(...) The collection refuses the unitary scheme of a narrative framework...[the author] insists on the fact that he has collected his short stories "otherwise not serving any order of time", without paying attention to the chronological succession of the composition, arranging them "according to what came to hand", in a completely random series in which the varied and equally random rhythm of existence is reflected: "a mixture of different accidents , which occurred differently in different places and times to different people and were recited without any order". (N. Sapegno, Treccani on line).