Titian's Helle and Ascanio de' Mori
the home of Barbara Calina. The other participants are four ladies and four gentlemen who have dropped by on their way to the theater, but hearing that the performance has been postponed they decide to play the alphabet game: each player in turn is assigned a letter of the alphabet and must tell a story describing a trip he or she has taken, naming the city, the inn, the innkeeper, and a garden visited, and in the garden a nymph, an animal, and a tree in which a bird sings a song; each of these items must begin with the assigned letter.2 There are eighteen such stories in the Giuoco, as well as a coda of poems, rhetorical exercises and novelle required of those players who had slipped up during the course of the game and can now win back the forfeits they paid as a penalty. De' Mori's book is more appealing than one might expect from this description: there is enough variety in the different accounts, and enough byplay between the participants, to hold the reader's interest. For Count Alfonso Capriolo's second turn in the game he must use the letter "N." He talks of the trip he took to Naples in 1563 to buy horses, describing his visit to Nobilaria, the garden of the