Short answers, pulled from the story.
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist who lived from the 16th of June 1313 to the 21st of December 1375. He is best known for The Decameron and On Famous Women, and is counted as one of the "Three Crowns" of Italian literature alongside Dante Alighieri and Petrarch.
Giovanni Boccaccio's most famous work is The Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories framed by a lieta brigata of three men and seven women. He began it around 1349, completed it largely by 1352, and revised it in 1370-1371.
Giovanni Boccaccio's birthplace is uncertain, given as Florence or a village near Certaldo, the Tuscan town his family came from. He died on the 21st of December 1375 in Certaldo, where he is buried.
Giovanni Boccaccio's poems Il Filostrato and Teseida were the sources for Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale. His influence also reached Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and the classical theatre of Spain.
Giovanni Boccaccio greeted Petrarch in Florence in October 1350 and hosted him, beginning a lasting friendship in which Boccaccio called Petrarch his teacher and magister. Petrarch encouraged him to study classical Greek and Latin literature, and the two helped lay the foundations of humanism in Florence.
Giovanni Boccaccio defended the study of ancient literature in his Genealogia deorum gentilium, completed in 1360, which remained a key reference on classical mythology for more than four hundred years. His championing of classical antiquity was an essential requirement for the revival that became a foundation of the Renaissance.