Doomed Love,

Camilo Castelo Branco

Lucinda Cunha, Cenatex, Guimarães, Portugal

The novel tells the story of Simão Botelho and Teresa de Albuquerque, who end up falling in love and living a hidden love, as they belong to two families that hate each other. Simão and Teresa are neighbors, and they maintain a courtship through their windows, which are close. The families, seeking to prevent their relationship, trying at all costs to arrange Teresa’s marriage with a cousin, and seeing that they could not, end up interning her in a convent.

Simão, after fighting with the servants of Teresa’s cousin’s house, stays in the house of a blacksmith who owed favors to his father. Mariana, the blacksmith’s daughter, ends up falling in love with Simão, while he keeps in touch with Teresa through letters.

In an attempt to rescue Teresa, Simão ends up shooting, constituting a love triangle. Teresa and Simão keep in touch by letter. The latter, in an attempt to rescue Teresa from the convent, ends up shooting Teresa’s cousin, Baltasar, and is sentenced to hang. The sentence, however, is not served, as the influences of her parents end up reducing her to ten years of exile in India. At the time of boarding, Simão sees Teresa, who dies of tuberculosis. Nine days after traveling, Simão ends up dying, also sick. When Simão’s body is thrown into the sea, Mariana, the blacksmith’s daughter, throws herself too.

The novel is part of the second phase of romanticism, characterized by portraying love that is taken to the last consequences, that is, until death itself. Like all good romantic romance novels, it has a very tragic tone, the characters face terrible obstacles in order to be happy in love. In the case of Doomed Love, the drama is very similar to that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, mainly due to the fact that there is rivalry between the families, and that there is a search of the two lovers to be together, against all external forces that try to separate them.

Giovanni Boccaccio

DECAMERON

“Nastagio degli Onesti”

Lisa Somma & III A RIM

IIS Vittorio Emanuele II, Naples – Italy

The tale “Nastagio degli Onesti” is the 8th of the 100 novellas of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

It tells about Nastagio degli Onesti, who is a noble in Ravenna in love with a girl of the noble family Traversari. To get her attention, Nastagio begins to squander his money on banquets and parties organized only for her. The girl does not return the love of Nastagio. His friends and relatives, seeing Nastagio’s despair, advise him to move to Chiasso to forget her. One Friday Nastagio, walking through a pine forest at dusk, sees a girl running naked in tears, being chased by two dogs and a Knight intending to kill her.

The knight was Guido of Anastagi who had once loved that woman and had committed suicide for her. When the girl died without any regrets for the misery she had inflicted on her admirer, she was sentenced to the cruel punishment of being hunted every Friday.

At this point Nastagio decides to prepare a banquet in the forest on the following Friday inviting the relatives of his beloved.

At the end of the dinner the horrifying scene is repeated. Nastagio explains the reasons for the girls’ fate. The girl loved by Nastagio, for fear of suffering the same fate, changes her mind and agrees to the marriage.

The story of Nastagio degli Onesti was painted by the famous artist Sandro Botticelli, around 1483.

The paintings are four wooden panels painted in tempera, commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent as a wedding gift to the couple of Giannozzo Pucci and Lucrezia Bini, to decorate a chest in the bridal chamber.

The first three episodes’ paintings are in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, and only the last one, after several moves, has returned to its original location in Palazzo Pucci, Florence.

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/scenes-from-the-story-of-nastagio-degli-onesti/6620fb36-c65d-497b-8283-92cef5bc08de

Thanks to this project III A RIM students has studied both the writer and the painter, In fact the Italian Literature and History of Art teachers have constantly collaborated and worked together, even with the support of the English teacher for what concerns the translations.

To complete the project, the teachers assigned to students a research about customs and traditions in the Middle Ages, the period in which the Decameron is set.

In this way, the students have been able to match their research on the ‘fashion industry’ in the Middle Ages with the clothing worn by the characters in Botticelli’s paintings.
The topic of fashion in the Middle Ages has been also treated from an economic point of view, involving the business economics teacher in the project.

In fact, the textile industry was strategic in that historical period and we can say that the textile industry and manufacturing generated the bourgeois social class and the first industrial production system in Italy.

In the Middle Ages, the main textile types and materials used to make clothes and cloaks were:

brocade – fabric in which contrasting colors are woven into specific areas to make patterns
cendal – lightweight silk, often used as lining
dyaspin/diasper – white-on-white patterned silk
ermine – white winter fur of a type of weasel, also utilizing the black-tipped tail
kermes – the most expensive dye, made from crushed insects that lived on oak trees; produced the colour crimson
miniver – gray and white fur of squirrel in winter
purple – silk fabric, not necessarily in the color purple
samite – slightly shiny silk fabric with a diagonal rib in its structure
scarlet – the most expensive woolen material, often dyed with kermes, the most expensive dye.
strandling – the rusty red fur of squirrel in autumn
taffeta – silk fabric of plain weave
tiretaine – fine woolen cloth
velvet – silk fabric with pile surface

Sandra Costa and Joaquim Lopes

Professional School Cenatex, Guimarães, Portugal

Here’s our common work. We hope you like it:

https://sites.google.com/cenatex.com.pt/fashion-and-literature/p%C3%A1gina-inicial