While there is little that is distinctly bucolic about the Ameto, the atmosphere is eminently pastoral in the wider sense.  Nymphs and shepherds, foresters and fauns meet at the temple of Venus; the limpid fountains and shady laurels belong essentially to the conventional landscape, whether of Sicily, of Arcadia, or of the hills overlooking the valley of the Arno.  The Italian imagination was not careful to differentiate between field and forest:  favola boschereccia was used synonymously with commedia pastorale; drammi dei boschi is a term which covers the whole of the pastoral drama.  But what really gives the Ameto its importance in the history of pastoral literature is the manner in which, undisturbed by its religions and allegorical machinery, it introduces us to a purely sensual and pagan paradise, in which love with all its pains and raptures reigns supreme.

The narratives of the nymphs, and indeed the whole of the prose portions of the work, are composed in a style of surcharged and voluptuous beauty, congested with lengthy periods, and accumulated superlatives and relative clauses, which, in its endeavour to maintain itself and its subject at the highest possible pitch, only succeeds in being intensely and almost uniformly monotonous and dull.  It is perfectly true that the work possesses some at least of the qualities of its defects.  There are passages which argue a feeling for beauty, none the less real for being of a somewhat conventional order, while we not seldom detect a certain rich luxuriance about the descriptions; but it must be admitted that on the whole the style exhibits most of Boccaccio’s faults and few of his merits.  The verse interspersed throughout is in terza rima, and offers small attraction to the ordinary reader:  ‘meschinissima cosa’ is a verdict which, if somewhat severe, will probably find few to contradict it.

In a certain passage, speaking of Poliziano’s Orfeo, Symonds remarks that ’while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus took the place of its hero.’  Without inquiring too closely how far the writers of the renaissance actually connected the hero of music, as a power of civilization, with their newly discovered country, it is interesting to note that the earliest work in the Italian language containing in however amoebean a state the pastoral ideal opens with an allusion to Orpheus.

    Quella vertu, che gia l’ardito Orfeo
      Mosse a cercar le case di Plutone,
      Allor che forse lieta gli rendeo
    La cercata Euridice a condizione,
      E dal suon vinto dell’ arguto legno,
      E dalla nota della sua canzone,
    Per forza tira il mio debile ingegno
      A cantar le tue Iode, o Citerea,
      Insieme con le forze del tuo regno[53].

Orpheus, however, does not stand alone.  Venus, Phoebus, Mars, Cupid, and finally Jove, are each in turn invoked, to say nothing of the incidental mention of Aeneas, Mirra, and Europa.  This love of mythology in and out of season is one of the most prominent features of the work.  One of the nymphs describes her youth in the following words: