Le Confabulationes di Poggio e il «palcoscenico» della Curia

The article reviews the structure as well as the rhetorical organization of Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber facetiarum. Furthermore, it suggests some hypothesis on the author’s narrative project by examining the amendments to the book occurred over the different editing stages. The article focuses on the dialogical setting, which coordinates the narrative pieces and brings the act of narration back to the conversations held within the humanistic circle of the papal Curia. Poggio chooses the pattern of Decameron «lieta brigata» and adapts it to the new context of the humanistic "confabulatio"; he also emphasizes the comic and the theatrical aspects of verbal interaction and creates a close relationship between the way of acting and the content of microtexts. In this way, the Confabulationes – according to the title chosen by the author for his book – represent and encode the new practice of the courtesan conversation, which will lead to the theoretical treatises of Pontano and Castiglione.