Ciacco

Dante meets Ciacco. Engraving by Gustave Doré

Ciacco is one of the characters in the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri that were not yet well defined by historians. This is how he presents himself to Dante when he is in Hell:

«Ye citizens were wont to call me Ciacco;
For the pernicious sin of gluttony,
I, as thou seest, am battered by this rain.»
(Inferno, VI, 52-54)

This way introducing himself allows us to interpret it in various ways, but one of the oldest commentators of the Comedy suggests a derogatory nature of this name: "Ciacco is said to be a pig's name, hence he was called this way for his gluttony". But today scholars think that it is more likely that Ciacco is a nickname for Giacomo or Iacopo, common names of the time, probably influenced by French Jacques.

Giovanni Boccaccio makes of Ciacco his protagonist in the Novel VIII of the Ninth day of the Decameron, describing him as "a man second to none that ever lived for inordinate gluttony ... and being, for the rest, well-mannered and well furnished with excellent and merry jests". However, he never says Ciacco's real name. It is hard to say if Boccaccio had attendable sources for his writings, but this name had never been found in literature before Dante. According to Vittorio Sermonti, a scholar dedicated to the study of the Comedy, the hypothesis that this Ciacco is the poet Ciacco dell'Anguillara is not true.

External links

• Novel VIII of the Ninth day of the Decameron