Templo de Diana

Templo de Diana is both a splendid sanctuary and a community ordered around love, fidelity, and chastity. Under the authority of the wise Felicia, it welcomes travelers burdened by romantic grief, sets a demanding standard for entry, and culminates in marriages that gather the book’s separated stories into one ceremonial scene. Its beauty is not merely decorative: inscriptions, memorials, music, and hospitality give the place a visible moral and narrative order.

Setting and Custodianship

The sanctuary is reached after Belisa leaves the island where she has been enduring her sorrow with the company of shepherds and shepherdesses. Three nymphs guide the company through a dense wood along a narrow path; beyond it lies a broad plain between two large rivers, where a great palace rises above the trees. Its shining rooflines and elaborate construction make it appear almost beyond ordinary human workmanship. The approach thus marks a passage from open wandering into a carefully ordered, exceptional space.

Felicia presides over the palace and its community. When the three nymphs arrive with Felismena and the shepherds, Felicia receives them warmly and recognizes Felismena without first needing to hear her story. She acknowledges the young woman’s service in rescuing the nymphs and promises to remain her ally, adding that Felismena will see what she desires if Felicia lives. She also assures the assembled shepherds and shepherdesses that she is attending to the remedy of their troubles. The sanctuary’s authority is therefore expressed through both recognition and practical hospitality: it offers shelter while holding out the prospect of help.

Admission and Moral Order

At the entrance, a metal tablet bears a short rule: entrants must examine how they have lived, whether they have kept their first faith, and whether they have preserved their first love. Those who have done so may enter Templo de Diana, whose virtue and grace are described as superhuman. The inscription makes admission a moral test rather than a matter of rank or wealth, joining the sanctuary’s sacred character to constancy in love.

Felismena remarks that she and Belisa and Selvagia seem safe to enter without violating the rule. Sireno immediately complicates that assurance: he argues that Diana herself has acted against the inscription and against the obligations of good love. The exchange makes the entrance rule more than a ceremonial ornament. It throws Diana’s conduct into contrast with the standard the sanctuary proclaims, while exposing Sireno’s continuing grief over her change of heart. Felicia tells him not to be distressed and predicts that he will soon be astonished at having suffered so much over the matter. The sanctuary’s promise of relief is thus placed beside, rather than outside, the painful memory its visitors carry with them.

Hospitality, Art, and Remembrance

Within the palace, the visitors are seated for a sumptuous meal and welcomed into conversation. The room is furnished with costly cedar tables, ivory seats, brocade, and vessels of glass, crystal, silver, and precious stones. Three nymphs play the lute, harp, and psaltery; the shepherds and shepherdesses answer with their own instruments, including Selvagia’s zampoña. This shared music makes the palace a meeting place for courtly display and pastoral performance, not simply a retreat from the world.

The company also encounters an elaborately decorated chamber whose images and artworks inspire wonder. Orfeo appears there as an enchanted musician; when he plays his harp, his music so absorbs the listeners that they forget what has happened to them. He then sings to Felismena, and the song turns toward a series of celebrated women and figures of high rank. The episode makes the sanctuary a place where art can redirect attention from private suffering toward beauty, memory, and public praise.

A garden extends this reflective aspect of the community. Among its fountains, arches, and flowering greenery stand the tombs of nymphs and ladies who, the narration says, preserved the chastity owed to the chaste goddess. Their graves are crowned with ivy, myrtle, or laurel. The garden’s beauty therefore coexists with visible memorials of women whose virtue has ended in death. In the sanctuary’s moral landscape, constancy is honored, but its memorial form also makes the costs and finality of that ideal impossible to overlook.

Community and Narrative Function

Templo de Diana brings together people whose stories have developed separately. The three nymphs return to Felicia with those they have rescued or accompanied; Felicia offers aid to the suffering shepherds; and Felismena’s arrival places her own search within the sanctuary’s network of protection and expectation. The place gathers these characters without erasing the differences in their experiences: Sireno still speaks from the wound of Diana’s betrayal, while Belisa’s sorrow remains difficult to console even amid companionship.

The community’s most decisive public action comes at the end of the book. Dorida invites Felismena and Don Félix to the temple, where Felicia and the shepherds and shepherdesses are waiting. They arrive and are received with joy; there, all are married to those they love. Sireno’s return contributes to the general rejoicing, although the narration points beyond this ending to further events involving the Portuguese shepherd Danteo and Duarda. The sanctuary thus serves as a gathering point and a setting for resolution, but not as a guarantee that every story is finished. Its collective wedding brings the present narrative to celebration while leaving some consequences open to continuation.