The Language of Gardens: Boccaccio's ‘Valle delle Donne’

‘Non solamente pe’ piani ma ancora per le profondissime valli mi sono ingegnato d'andare.’ Boccaccio defends the Decameron from envious critics, in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, by denying ambition. He is writing, he says, in the humblest style, in the vernacular, in prose; his little stories have no titles; his readers are idle women: in short, far from attempting any literary heights, as he writes the Decameron he walks through valleys. Some valleys, though, are gardens. At the end of the Sixth Day, the seven women of the story-telling brigata seem to act out Boccaccio's metaphor for his own project. They slip away from their male companions and walk to a secluded spot which Elissa knows about, the Valle delle Donne. Before returning to the rule of king Dioneo, the ladies amuse themselves in the circular valley, admiring its natural beauty and swimming naked in the pool at its center. The excursion is, like the very different Introduction to the Fourth Day, a brief digression from the sequence of one hundred stories, yet it provides a unique point of entrance into the poetics of the Decameron.