The sea of merchants, the sea of stories. Perception and representation of the Mediterranean in late medieval novels.

Abstract

In the second half of the fourteenth century, the many explorations promoted by the new commerciale world fostered the development of a renewed interest in the «gran teatro del Mediterraneo». While the taste for a spatial and cultural otherness consolidated, in late fourteenth-century bourgeois fiction, the image of the mare nostrum as a chronotope of transgression and change, a space full of pitfalls in which the navigator can enriching himself or risks to shipwreck, it also revived the idea of the sea as an itinerary of formation, a necessary symbolic passage, a spatial movement that represented perhaps one of the main metaphors of the short story.

By means of a reading of some tales from Giovanni Sercambi’s Novelliere and Pecorone, this paiper aims to investigate the vision of the Mediterranean in late medieval fiction after the Decameron. Starting from an analysis of the representation present in the Boccaccio, it is noted how the sea takes the delineated outlines of a mirror, in which are reflected the socio-political conflicts of the contemporary world and the new virtues of the rising productive merchant class.