Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was an Italian writer born in Florence, then a republic and a rich centre of trade and learning. He spent much of his youth in Naples, where he first turned seriously to poetry and storytelling, and later he served his native city in various public roles. He was a friend and admirer of Petrarch, and together with Dante and Petrarch he is counted among the three great Florentine writers of the fourteenth century. Boccaccio wrote in both Italian and Latin. His best-known work is the Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales told by a group of young people sheltering from plague, which mixes comedy, love, cunning and sorrow in lively prose. He also wrote poems, a psychological prose romance, scholarly works on classical myth and famous men and women, and an early life of Dante. His clear, flexible vernacular prose influenced later European storytellers, including Chaucer. He died on 21 December 1375.