Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was a 14th-century Italian writer and scholar, best known for the Decameron, a hundred stories framed by the plague that struck Florence in 1348. Writing mostly in the Tuscan vernacular, he helped make it a language fit for serious prose, and with his friend Petrarch he laid early foundations for Renaissance humanism. Italians count him, with Dante and Petrarch, among the "Three Crowns" of their literature.

He was born in 1313, either in Florence or near Certaldo, the Tuscan town his family came from. His father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a Florentine merchant who worked for the powerful Bardi banking company; his mother is unknown, and he was probably born outside marriage.

In 1326 his father was sent to run a bank in Naples, and the family moved south. Boccaccio was apprenticed in banking, disliked it, and then spent about six years studying canon law, which he liked little more. What he valued in Naples was its learned circles and the court of King Robert the Wise, whose culture was strongly French. There he began writing poetry and prose romances, among them the Filostrato and the Teseida, works that later supplied plots to Geoffrey Chaucer for Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale.

Political tension between the Angevin kingdom of Naples and Florence, and his father's bankruptcy, drew him back to Florence in early 1341. Florence was then a troubled city, and in 1348 the Black Death killed a very large share of its people. Boccaccio's stepmother died in the epidemic and his father the following year, leaving him in charge of the family. Whether he himself was in the city during the worst months is uncertain; from 1347 he spent long periods in Ravenna looking for patrons.

He began the Decameron around 1349 and had largely finished it by 1352. Its frame is simple: seven young women and three young men escape plague-stricken Florence for a villa in the hills, and to pass the time each tells a story on each of ten days. The tales, many of them reworked from older material, range from bawdy jokes and clever tricks to tragic love. They are notable for lively, natural dialogue and for characters drawn from merchants, servants, clergy and townspeople rather than only knights and saints. Boccaccio revised the book in 1370–1371, and that manuscript in his own hand survives.

In October 1350 Boccaccio was chosen to welcome Petrarch to Florence and lodged him in his house. The two became lifelong friends, and Boccaccio called Petrarch his teacher. Under his influence he turned increasingly to Latin scholarship. His Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, first completed in 1360, became a standard handbook of classical mythology for centuries and argued that Christians could learn much from ancient literature. He also wrote moral biographies of famous men and, in On Famous Women, accounts of more than a hundred women from history and legend.

He served Florence on embassies to the papal court at Avignon, to Rome and elsewhere. After a failed coup in 1361 led to the execution or exile of several friends, he withdrew to Certaldo. In 1373 he gave public lectures on Dante's Comedy in Florence, the basis of his last major work. In poor health, he died at Certaldo on 21 December 1375, a year and a half after Petrarch.

Boccaccio was the first great champion of Dante Alighieri, copying his poem and writing his biography. In the 16th century the scholar Pietro Bembo held up Boccaccio's style as the model for Italian prose. Beyond Italy his stories fed Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and later Spanish writers including Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and his defence of pagan learning became part of the intellectual basis of the Renaissance.

Our 1300 map shows the divided Italy of his youth, with the Kingdom of Naples in the south and the Papal States across the centre; the 1400 map shows the peninsula a generation after his death.