La macchina dell’«Inamoramento». Le strutture narrative del poema boiardesco

The project is the first global approach to the Renaissance chivalric poem of Matteo Maria Boiardo, L’Inamoramento de Orlando. The scholarship on Boiardo’s poem is focused on the main issues of textual criticism or on single episodes on the plot. Apart from Marco Praloran’s studies on the formal structures of the poem, there is a complete lack of comprehensive studies on the narrative structure of the work. Boiardo’s narrative technique, as Riccardo Bruscagli has argued, unfolds though the mechanism of ‘ventura’ (chance), resulting in a juxtaposition of episodes and facts. However, the narration in the Inamoramento de Orlando is not lacking in coherence. The aim of this work is to prove that Boiardo’s poem is not a ‘splendid chaos’, as Edoardo Sanguineti has defined it, but that it is organized around defined guidelines and central ideas. The events of the poem appears to happen in relation to the characters, that are the real magnetic force. The plot is thus built not as the casual sum of adventures and challenges that characterise the quetes of the paladins, but rather following some predetermined directions that influence the paladins themselves. In this lies the extraordinary modernity of Boiardo’s poem