Il «De Cavichiolo»: una commedia umanistica al crocevia di generi diversi

The so-called De Cavichiolo, a brief dialogic text comprising 76 elegiac couplets, centred on the exchange between a dissatisfied wife and a sodomite husband, has posed many delicate and controversial problems to those scholars who have studied this work. The principal issues, strictly correlated and interdependent, concern the chronology of the pièce (hypothesis range between the XII-XIII and XV centuries) and the relationship connecting this text to Boccaccio’s tale of Pietro di Vinciolo (Decam. V 10). In this paper the author (after his critical edition of the De Cavichiolo) newly looks on the text, a play having his place in the first period of latin humanistic comedy (perchance around 1440), and characterized by a various meddling of literary genres: classical elegy and epigram, elegiac comedy, medieval altercationes and conflictus, classical and medieval tale, mockery and facetia.