"These short 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 reductions of Painter and Fenton, as well as in Spain, in the original and translated, and offered ideas and schemes 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 fortune beyond the Alps, more than Italian. The complete original edition of the 4 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 camps, but seen above all from the quintessential "worldly" perspective, precisely of those salons where "the highest and finest minds" meet... The short stories are 214 in all, 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 serving any order of time", without paying attention to the chronological succession of the composition, arranging them "as they came to his hands", 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 recited without any order". (N. Sapegno, Treccani on line ).