An endless success story: Another 16th century Italian translation of E. S. Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus (Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, Ms 2837)

Abstract

The article presents the possible Latin source texts of an Italian translation of Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus, which was not discussed in my second monograph (Máté 2023) written on the textual tradition of the humanistic love story. I argue that the translation by Giovanni Antonio Fineo bearing the incipit-title L’amore di Eurialo et Lucretia successo in Siena (1585) is related to the Venetian printing industry, and it was based on a Latin variant of Historia, transmitted by the Sessa printer family. According to my research, the manuscript translation held nowadays in Perugia at the Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, as ms 2837, pertains to the so-called Misereor=Adonis textual group of the Latin textual tradition. Its possible sources are similar to those Latin variants of Historia, on which two earlier Italian translators, the Anonymous of Veneto and Alamanno Donati, based their own works. At the end of my article, I summarize the twentyfour translations of Historia examined by me so far, grouping them according to their pertinance to the big branches of the Latin textual tradition in chronological order.