Giovanni Boccaccio

• 1. The Certaldese

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  Giovanni Boccaccio was known by his contemporaries simply as "the Certaldese", named for the small Tuscan town of Certaldo where his family came from. He wrote The Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories, and On Famous Women, a book of biographies. The scholar Vittore Branca called him the greatest European prose writer of his time. Yet the details of his birth remain uncertain. He was born on the 16th of June 1313, the son of a Florentine merchant named Boccaccino di Chellino and an unknown woman, likely outside of marriage. How did the illegitimate son of a banker become one of the "Three Crowns" of Italian literature, set beside Dante Alighieri and Petrarch? Why did he reportedly come to repudiate his own masterpiece as profane? The answers run through a banking apprenticeship he hated, a friendship that reshaped his ambitions, and a plague that killed three-quarters of a city.

• 2. A Banker's Son In Naples

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  In 1326, Boccaccino di Chellino was appointed head of a bank and moved his family from Florence to Naples. Young Boccaccio became an apprentice there, but he disliked the banking profession intensely. He persuaded his father to let him study law instead, at the Studium that is now the University of Naples, where he spent six years on canon law. He enjoyed law no more than banking. His father had worked for the Compagnia dei Bardi and married Margherita dei Mardoli, a woman from a well-to-do family, in the 1320s. Through his father's connections, Boccaccio entered the French-influenced court of Robert the Wise, the king of Naples. There he befriended a fellow Florentine, Niccolò Acciaioli, who would later become Grand Seneschal to Queen Joanna I of Naples. His early influences included Paolo da Perugia, who compiled a collection of myths called the Collectiones, and the humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili. In Naples, Boccaccio began what he considered his true vocation: poetry.

• 3. Source For Chaucer

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  Il Filostrato and Teseida, both written during the Naples years, became the sources for Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale. Chaucer was a key figure in English literature, and Boccaccio's reach extended well past Italy. The Filocolo was a prose version of an existing French romance, while La caccia di Diana was a poem in terza rima listing Neapolitan women. This period brought considerable formal innovation, possibly including the introduction of the Sicilian octave, a form that went on to influence Petrarch. Later, Boccaccio's influence touched Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and the classical theatre of Spain. Boccaccio wrote his imaginative literature mostly in Tuscan vernacular, and his realistic dialogue set him apart from contemporaries who followed formulaic models for character and plot. That distinctive style would later be elevated by Pietro Bembo in the sixteenth century, who made the Boccaccian manner a model of Italian prose.

• 4. Plague And A Hundred Tales

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  In 1348 the Black Death struck Florence, killing some three-quarters of the city's population. Boccaccio later set this catastrophe inside The Decameron, whose frame-story follows a lieta brigata of three men and seven women. He returned to Florence in early 1341, having avoided the plague of 1340 in that city, though he also missed Petrarch's visit to Naples that year. His father had returned to Florence in 1338 and gone bankrupt, and his mother may have died shortly afterward. Dissatisfied with his return, Boccaccio still produced the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine in 1341, the fifty-canto Amorosa visione in 1342, and The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta in 1343. His father died in 1349, forcing Boccaccio into a more active role as head of the family. He began work on The Decameron around 1349, settling on a hundred tales, and the work was largely complete by 1352. Decades later, in 1370-1371, he revised and rewrote it, and that manuscript has survived to the present day.

• 5. The Teacher

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  In October 1350, Boccaccio was chosen to greet Francesco Petrarch as he entered Florence and to host him at his own home. The meeting proved extremely fruitful, and the two were friends from then on, with Boccaccio calling Petrarch his teacher and magister. Petrarch urged him to study classical Greek and Latin literature. They met again in Padua in 1351, when Boccaccio came on an official mission to invite Petrarch to take a chair at the university in Florence. The invitation failed, but their discussions helped shape the Genealogia deorum gentilium, whose first edition was completed in 1360. That work remained a key reference on classical mythology for more than four hundred years. Some sources see Petrarch converting Boccaccio from the open humanist of The Decameron toward a more ascetic style. Following meetings with Pope Innocent VI and with Petrarch in 1359, Boccaccio probably took some kind of religious mantle. A persistent but unsupported tale holds that in 1362 he repudiated his earlier works as profane, The Decameron among them. Boccaccio met Petrarch one last time in Padua in 1368.

• 6. Champion Of The Ancients

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  The Genealogia deorum gentilium served as an extended defence of the studies of ancient literature and thought. Despite the pagan beliefs at its core, Boccaccio held that much could be learned from antiquity. He challenged clerical intellectuals who wanted to limit access to classical sources, arguing they need not cause moral harm to Christian readers. His defence of ancient literature was an essential requirement for the revival of classical antiquity that became a foundation of the Renaissance. Boccaccio pushed for the study of Greek, housing Leontius Pilatus and encouraging his tentative translations of Homer, Euripides, and Aristotle. He helped lay the foundations of humanism in Florence, working alongside Petrarch. He also initiated Dante's criticism and philology, copying codices of the Divine Comedy and promoting both the work and the figure of Dante. In 1373, he gave a series of lectures on Dante at the Santo Stefano church, which produced his final major work, the detailed Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante.

• 7. Servant Of Florence

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  Boccaccio's first official mission for the Florentine government came in late 1350, sending him to Romagna. He was later sent to Brandenburg, Milan, and Avignon, and he took minor orders during these years. After a failed coup in 1361, a number of his close friends and acquaintances were executed or exiled in the purge that followed. Though not directly linked to the conspiracy, Boccaccio left Florence that year to live in Certaldo, withdrawing from government affairs. He undertook no further missions until 1365, when he travelled to Naples, then to Padua and Venice, meeting Petrarch in grand style at Palazzo Molina, the home of Petrarch's library. That same year he carried out a mission to Pope Urban V, and when the papacy returned to Rome from Avignon in 1367, he was sent again to offer congratulations. In 1360 he had begun De mulieribus claris, biographies of 106 famous women, completing it in 1374; the book was illustrated with depictions of the women, some shown practising their skills, such as fine art painting.

• 8. Certaldo, Where He Is Buried

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  Boccaccio's final years were troubled by illness, some of it relating to obesity and what was often described as dropsy, a severe edema understood today as congestive heart failure. He learned of Petrarch's death on the 19th of July 1374 and wrote a commemorative poem, placing it in his collection of lyric poems, the Rime. Petrarch had offered to buy Boccaccio's library so it would join his own. Instead, upon Boccaccio's death his entire collection went to the monastery of Santo Spirito in Florence, where it still resides. He died on the 21st of December 1375 in Certaldo, the same town that gave him his nickname, and there he is buried. In the twentieth century his work drew fresh attention: Vittore Branca and Giuseppe Billanovich produced critical-philological studies, and the director Pier Paolo Pasolini brought The Decameron to the big screen.