ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The Asolani are a treatise in 3 books in the form of dialogue, written between 1497 and 1502 by Pietro Bembo, and constitute his first important work.
It is a dialogue on love, set in the 15th century Asolo, at the court of Caterina Corner (or Cornaro). The first edition was published in 1505 by Aldo Manuzio, the second edition was published, after several remodelings, in 1530, while the very first is the handwritten editorial, called “queriniana”.

Structure and characters
It is a treatise on the nature of Love in the form of dialogue, inspired by the classical Latin dialogues, in the form of prosimeter (i.e. with a mixture of prose and verses) and equipped with a narrative frame (for which certainly model is the Decameron of Boccaccio).

We do not own any autograph of the “queriniana” editorial staff, but it is still considered faithful. The princeps of 1505 contains the dedication to Lucrezia Borgia, who will instead be removed in the 1530 edition, which also undergoes a linguistic revision in the light of the Prose della Volgar Lingua (1525).

It is divided into three books, held together by a narrative frame that includes 3 days of celebrations in the gardens of the Queen of Cyprus Catherine Cornaro, in Asolo.
Book I - Perottino: the unhappy lover, speaks of pain and malaise that is born from love.
Book II - Gismondo: the happy lover who refutes Perottino's thesis by fearing the positivity of love.
Book III - Lavinello: refutes the previous thesis, supports the theory of platonic love, therefore understood as contemplation of the ideal beauty present in earthly things.
End of Book III - Lavinello tells of a hermit savio, which exposes a doctrine of love inspired by Christian asceticism, i.e., as the prolongation towards a transcendent God, which involves total disinterest for earthly beauty and the exclusive desire for contemplation of that divine.

To these fundamental parts is added a frame of dialogues and descriptions not aimed at the theme of love, but that represents the court life and the villa of Caterina Corner. There are also several poetic compositions, only partly connected with the subject of the text.

Other projects

Asolani
Asolani
Caterina Corner