ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The rooms of messer Angelo Poliziano started for the carousel of the magnificent Giuliano di Pietro de Medici, better known as Rooms for the Joust, are an unfinished work in vulgar language of the Italian poet Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494).

Genesis of the Work
The opera, a poem in octaves, was composed to celebrate the victory reported by Giuliano de' Medici in a tournament held on 29 January 1475 in Florence, in the square of Santa Croce; the tournament had been organized by the lord of Florence, Lorenzo il Magnifico, brother of Giuliano, to celebrate the peace agreement between the Italian powers narrowed in 1474 thanks to the action of the Magnificent. The poem, whose realization began in the same year 1475, consists of two books: the first of one hundred and twenty-five octaves, the second of only forty-six; the composition was in fact interrupted, with all probability, because of the death of Giuliano and the wounding of Lorenzo in the uprising followed to the conjure of the Pazzi, on 26 April 1478.

In the writing of the Rooms, Poliziano was inspired by a work by Luigi Pulci, who had been the author, in 1469, of a similar text aimed at the exaltation of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Poliziano chose to write in vulgar language, using as a strofa (or room) the octave, already used by Giovanni Boccaccio in the Philostrate. Next to the encomystic theme of the eulogy of Giuliano, the work also tells the platonic love of Giuliano for a Florentine woman, Simonetta Cattaneo, bride of Marco di Piero Vespucci. The design of the work had to be modified in 1476 due to Simonetta's sudden death on 26 April.

The rooms were first published in 1484 in the collection Cose vulgare del Poliziano; the edition of Aldo Manuzio of 1498 is of fundamental importance. In the course of the 16th century, the rooms were often tampered, according to the taste of time, by those who wanted to eliminate the popular vein characteristic of the still refined style of Poliziano. Only in 1863, thanks to the commitment of Giosuè Carducci, he saw the light a new edition philologically accurate, where the Rooms were presented in their original version, purified by the interpolations and the sixteenth century changes.

The merits of the work, rather than in the plot, particularly slender, are in the very meaning of the literary operation carried out by Poliziano in the Rooms:

Trama
In the first book, consisting of one hundred and twenty-five rooms, Iulio or Iulo, classically transfiguration of Giuliano, is represented as a beautiful and courageous young man, in perfect adherence to the mythical paradigm of Ippolito. He lives harmoniously, despising Love and dedicating himself to the exercises of the body, hunting and poetic activity. However Cupid, with the intent of revenge, while Iulo is engaged in a hunting trip, makes him appear in front of a splendid deer, that the young man tries, without success, to reach. When the two arrive in u