California Italian Studies

This essay offers a geocritical reading of Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium for its unique combination of poetry and geography. The Genealogy features the poet’s journey through the Mediterranean Sea, and in particular through the Archipelago, the Aegean Sea, to describe places where the myths of the pagan gods and their progeny unfolded, with the end goal of establishing the veracity of poetry. In so doing, he adopts an empirical approach to the search of the truth of the myths, thereby making a cartography of the poetry, a unique humanistic space in which he rescues the relics of a shipwrecked past by mapping spaces and places of civilization.