On the sixteenth century of On famous women. Boccaccio, theatre and feminine biography

The article examines, by means of several examples, the sixteenth-century translation of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris by the multi-faceted writer Giuseppe Betussi, published in 1545. The author of the vernacular translation adds further female biographies that attest the shift from Boccaccio's "mulier clara" to the perfect Renaissance woman. Thanks to Betussi, the author of De mulieribus, as well as of De casibus, continued in the second half of the sixteenth century to be an extraordinary source for stories, employed by tragedies (as is clear for the characters of Cleopatra, Marianna and Rosmunda) and, later, by the novel.