"These stories of mine... are not fables, but true stories."
THE MOST INSPIRED AUTHOR OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, whose inventions immediately penetrated France, with the translations of Launay and Belleforest, and, through French mediation, in England, with the versions and abridgements of Painter and Fenton, as well as in Spain, in the original and in translation, and offered ideas and models to the playwrights of the Elizabethan age ( Shakespeare, Webster, Marston ), to the comedies of Lope de Vega , to the short stories of Cervantes . An immense success beyond the Alps rather than in Italy. The complete original edition of the four books is extremely rare.

"The collection of short stories is not only B.'s largest and most lengthily elaborated work, but also the one in which all aspects of his personality are best reflected: a vast and varied experience of the world, matured in the long practice of courts, in private negotiations and diplomatic maneuvers, in frequenting the encampments, but seen above all from the "worldly" perspective par excellence, precisely of those salons where "the highest and finest minds" gather... The short stories are 214 in total, distributed in four parts, of which the first three, edited in 1554 by the author, have an almost equal length, while the fourth, published posthumously in 1573, collects less copious and perhaps less elaborate material. (...) The collection rejects the unitary scheme of a narrative framework... [the author] insists on the fact that he has gathered his short stories "without otherwise maintaining any order of time", without paying attention to the chronological succession of the composition, arranging them "as they came to hand", in a completely random series which reflects the varied and equally random rhythm of existence: "a mixture of different accidents, which happened differently in different places and times to different people and were recounted without any order". (N. Sapegno, Treccani on line ).