Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was an Italian writer, poet and humanist of the Republic of Florence, counted with Dante and Petrarch among the founding figures of Italian literature. [1] His masterwork, the Decameron, gave European prose fiction a durable model and influenced writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare, while his Latin scholarship helped set the course of early Renaissance humanism. [2]
Early life
Boccaccio was born in 1313, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant associated with the Bardi banking house. He is traditionally linked to Certaldo, the Tuscan town where he later lived and died. [1] As a young man he was sent to Naples, first to train in commerce and then to study canon law, neither of which held his interest.
Naples proved decisive nonetheless. At the Angevin court he encountered a cosmopolitan literary culture, read widely in classical and vernacular literature, and began writing. His early works, among them Filocolo, Filostrato and Teseida, experimented with romance narrative and with the verse form later known as ottava rima.
The Decameron
Boccaccio returned to Florence around 1341 and witnessed the plague epidemic of 1348, which killed a large part of the city's population. The Decameron, composed in the years that followed, frames its hundred tales as stories told over ten days by seven women and three men who have withdrawn to the countryside to escape the pestilence. [3]
The tales range from the bawdy to the tragic and draw on merchants, clerics, servants and nobles alike, treating ordinary human conduct with a realism and irony new to the literature of its time. Written in the Florentine vernacular, the book helped fix Tuscan as the basis of literary Italian and became one of the most imitated works of the European Middle Ages. [2]
Humanist scholarship
In his later years Boccaccio turned largely to Latin and to scholarship. He compiled the Genealogia deorum gentilium, an encyclopaedic treatment of classical mythology that served scholars for centuries, along with reference works on famous women and on the fall of illustrious men. [1]
He was an early and active promoter of Greek learning in Italy and a friend of Petrarch, whose influence turned him toward classical studies. He also revered Dante: he wrote a life of the poet, gave the Divine Comedy its enduring reputation in Florence, and delivered public lectures on the poem in the city in the last years of his life. [4]
Later life and legacy
Boccaccio undertook diplomatic missions on behalf of Florence and held minor civic appointments, but his final years were spent in relative retirement at Certaldo, in declining health and modest circumstances. He died there on 21 September 1375. [1]
His reputation rests above all on the Decameron, whose narrative frame and secular subject matter shaped later storytelling across Europe. Chaucer drew on his poems and tales, and generations of dramatists and novelists mined his plots. Together with Dante and Petrarch he is conventionally described as one of the "three crowns" of Italian letters. [2]
