SERMINI GENTILE, da SIENA. - Traditional, though not certain, author of «uno paneretto d'insalatella», a kind of miscellany and book of recollections in verse and prose, interspersed with 40 novellas, the last of them unfinished, heard recounted at the Baths of Petriolo.
From novella XII it is known that S. da Siena, having taken refuge on a nearby mountain because of the plague of 1424, found there an agreeable priest, but mountaineers so rude that he was compelled to return to his city, near the woman he loved; there, to oblige a friend, he gathered together his writings scattered «per scartabelli e squarciafogli». He collects and narrates without any precise design, without evident influences other than that of Boccaccio, in a spontaneous style and rustic language; now vivid and now prolix, now delicate and now indecent, now moralizing and now lascivious.