Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was a fourteenth-century Italian writer, poet, and humanist scholar, a foundational figure of early Renaissance vernacular literature alongside Dante and Petrarch. The illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant, he was sent as a youth to Naples, where he trained in commerce and canon law and began writing. Returning to Florence, he composed the Decameron, a frame-narrative of one hundred tales set against the 1348 plague, which shaped later European prose. He also produced Latin encyclopedic works on mythology, geography, and notable women, and championed Dante. His later years, partly spent at Certaldo, turned toward classical scholarship and public lecturing on the Divine Comedy.