Nuovi mondi e antichi dèi. L’influenza della mitografia nelle descrizioni religiose del De Canaria di Boccaccio

This paper examines Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Canaria from a historical-religious perspective. This short treatise, which constitutes the first European ethnographic description of the populations of the Canary Islands, represents an emblematic moment in the formation of interpretative categories of religious otherness. The analysis focuses on the description of the place of worship and the divine statue contained in the text, showing how the lexicon and iconographic schemes of the mythographic tradition become tools for categorising unknown temples, deities, and cult practices. The De Canaria thus represents a new type of ethnography marked by humanistic sensibility, anticipating mechanisms typical of modern ethnographic descriptions.