page_title: Macalda di Scaletta
section_title: The Decameron
hierarchical_section_title: Macalda di Scaletta / Macalda in imagination and literature / The Decameron
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Pierre III d'Aragon et Lisa Puccini
context_page_description: Macalda di Scaletta was a Sicilian baroness, warrior woman, lady-in-waiting, and courtesan during the Angevin and Aragonese periods. Though the daughter of Giovanni di Scaletta and a Sicilian noblewoman, she was of humble origins. Macalda was noted for her unscrupulous political conduct, inclination to betray marriage, and for her easy and promiscuous sexual habits; this dissoluteness, even having a brush with "suspicion of incest," tended to degenerate into an "exhibitionism veined with nymphomania." She was the wife of the Grand Justiciar of the Kingdom of Sicily, Alaimo da Lentini.
  Proud Amazon, educated in arms and courage, gifted with a martial bearing, moved by a cynical and ambitious nature, Macalda's vigorous feminine personality deployed her influence first in the circle of Charles of Anjou and then at the court of Peter III of Aragon, whom, according to a chronicler of the time, Macalda tried to seduce, but without success.
context_section_description: A distant echo of Macalda's passion for the Aragonese king survives in the tale of Lisa Puccini and her forlorn love for King Piero of Raona in the novella narrated by Pampinea during the tenth day of Boccaccio's Decameron.
  Enormous, however, is the disparity of accents that separates the "poisonous" chronicle of Bartholomaeus from the Boccaccio episode, in a context suffused with lingering courtly and knightly virtues that are better suited to the figure of King Peter, known for his virtues of "prudence" and his "knightly soul" that contributed to leave a "vast record in the literature of the time" about him.
  It is also possible that, in Bartholomaeus, the version of the anecdote was the fruit of a malevolent elaboration, to validate or justify a posteriori the ill-fated role that Macalda had in persuading Alaimo di Lentini to the presumed betrayal: this could also explain the different treatment that Desclot reserves for Macalda's falling in love with the Aragonese sovereign in his Catalan chronicle.
  The fact then that Boccaccio, not knowing of Desclot's work, came to know of a similar story could indicate that a courtly version of the anecdote was circulated, perhaps orally, in various locations, being transformed through the typical routes of oral tradition, before reaching the ears of the Decameron's author.
caption: King Peter, with Constance behind, kisses the ailing Lisa Puccini in the novella of Pampinea from the Decameron, a distant echo of Macalda's amorous transport for the king
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