Missing the "Diceria de Nasi" (an unrelated treatise on famous noses) which made up pp. 105-118 of the booklet. The complete pagination of the booklet by Aretino and Caro (see below) is (10), 198; (2), (6), 339, (1); 118 pp., this is the first 104 pp. of the third part, complete for Caro's 'Fica' poem.
Successful and hilarious work which epitomises the bawdy intellectualism of the Italian Renaissance. Annibale Caro (1507-66) studied humanae litterae and philosophy in Florence, spent some time in Venice where he met the controversial author Pietro Aretino, and later moved to Rome where he joined the Accademia dei Vignaioli. Best known for his translation of the Aeneid , Caro also published some bawdy poems which turned Aretino s strongly graphic sexual language into a humanist intellectual game in the style of the Roman author Bernia. The Commento is a scholarly disquisition by Ser Agresto (Caro s persona) on the Ficheide or Ficaide , an unpublished fictional poem by Padre Siceo (the author Francesco Maria Molza). Its theme is the half- literal/half-metaphorical concept of fico (fig tree or fruit, and here male genitalia) and fica a feminine form which troubled, according to Agresto, even great philologists like Valla normally unrelated to fruit and signifying female genitalia in its most vulgar sense. Whilst rejecting the Petrarchistic and Boccacistic language in favour of plain Tuscan, within a world in which laureate poets are crowned with fig leaves, the work explores through philology, etymology, rhetoric and literature the hermaphrodite dimension of fico / fica . This is identified as a quasi-Aristotelian principle of generation and the essence of Nature and all sublunary matter which philosophers had long researched. It is a tour-de- force of doubles entendres (bordering on tongue-in- cheek Malapropisms) whereby nouns, adjectives and verbs continuously flesh out the concepts of penetrating, coming, spreading, fondling, sucking and licking. As explained in a revised Virgilian passage, Carthage was destroyed by Aeneas s fico and Dido s fica ; similarly, Homer s war of Troy the Italian troia meaning prostitute was started by Helen s fica . The commentator also reports dialogues with Lombard workers who answer that the sweetest thing is certainly the figa a regional variation still used as a common, not necessarily too vulgar exclamation in Milanese dialect. Eventually, after hearing a Florentine gentleman wishing for a fica so big he might enter it in his mantel, hood and all, Agresto yearns for a political utopia in which the great minds leading our Republics may learn, like this gentleman, to maintain their civilisation and master its greatness.
The Commento was first printed in 1538; later it became part of a collection of bawdy works, including Aretino's Ragionamenti , published in London in 1584.