Paolo M.G. Maino

SUMMARY: Lionardo Salviati published his own rassettatura of Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1582 after at least two years of work. The purpose of his work was twofold: a massive censorship in order to make the Decameron acceptable to the Roman Inquisition, and the recovery of the 14th century original vernacular language. The present essay explores the philological work undertaken by Salviati in order to restore the Decameron true reading (the so called ‘vera lezione’); Salviati clearly choosed to recover and follow the Mannelli codex variants against the choices of the Florentine deputies and of the 1527 Florentine edition. Therefore Salviati’s rassettatura is not a simple descriptus of the deputies’ edition, but it aims to be a renewed Decameron as well from the moral point of view as from the linguistic and philological one.