Abstract

Far beyond the story full of tricks between typical “personaeµ of Renaissance Theatre – the cuckold, the sponger, the depraved friar an so on – Machiavelli wants to show, in this play, what kind of violent forces, inside our nature, incline to make fast impossible the constitution of a real civitas. Virtue, virtus, means for Machiavelli above all science and art of government, but no one, in this world, seems to be able to win or at least to control his own natural egoism – and even the young woman who seems to be the victim of the plot, at last reveals herself but a figure of the power of vices not allowing the town to become a res publica.