for the excellence of their style. Like Sacchetti's, they are mostly genuine anecdotes, or at least founded upon fact or popular tradition; some are taken with little alteration from Villani's Chronicles. Nothing is certainly known of the author, except that he began to write his tales in 1378 at the Castle of Dovadola, in compulsory or voluntary exile from his native city. He is believed to have been a notary, and a partisan of the Guelf faction.
Giovanni da Prato, author of Il Paradin degli Alberti (about 1420) also deserves mention here, on account of the short stories inserted into his ethical dialogues; but the first novelist of much importance after Giovanni Fiorentino is Massuccio of Salerno, a Neapolitan, who seems to have been a man of rank, and to have been for some time in the service of the Duke of Milan. He wrote about 1470, and his tales were first printed in 1476. The celebrity which he continues to enjoy is, it may be feared, mainly owing to his character as the most licentious of the Italian novelists in fact, although, if we may trust his own assurance, the most virtuous in intention. His tales are divided into five parts, each of the first three of which has what the writer considers to be a distinct moral purpose. In the first, in Dunlop's words, "the scope of the stories is to show that God will sooner or later inflict vengeance on dissolute monks." The second "proves that the monks of those days invented many frauds." The third "is intended to show that the greatest and finest ladies of Italy indulged in gallantries of a nature which did them very little honour." All these propositions might have been thought susceptible of demonstration without the Novellino, and much better established than Massuccio's claim to a place
