Giovanni Boccaccio

Anyone asking who was Giovanni Boccaccio must begin with a question his contemporaries could not fully answer: where exactly was he born? He came into the world on June 16, 1313, most likely in Certaldo, a hill town in the Val d'Elsa southwest of Florence, though Florence itself and even Paris were later proposed by admirers who wanted a grander origin story ^[1]. He was the illegitimate son of Boccaccino di Chellino, a merchant from Certaldo who worked as an agent for the powerful Bardi banking company. His mother's identity is unknown, and the romantic legend that she was a French noblewoman is an invention that scholars long ago set aside ^[2].

Boccaccino acknowledged the boy and raised him in Florence, where Giovanni received his first schooling under the grammarian Giovanni Mazzuoli da Strada. The father had commercial ambitions for his son, and around 1327 he took the teenager to Naples, where the Bardi bank financed the Angevin court of King Robert of Anjou ^[1]. Giovanni was apprenticed to the counting house, an occupation he later described as six wasted years. When banking failed to take, his father redirected him toward canon law at the Neapolitan studium, which the young man found scarcely more agreeable ^[3].

Naples, however, gave him everything the ledgers could not. The Angevin capital held a royal library, a cosmopolitan aristocracy, and a circle of scholars that included the librarian Paolo da Perugia and the astronomer Andalò del Negro. Moving between the merchant quarter and the fringes of the court, Boccaccio read French romances, classical Latin poetry, and the new Italian verse of Dante, and he began to write ^[2].

The Neapolitan years produced Boccaccio's earliest surviving works and a fictional muse who would shadow his writing for decades. In poems and prose he celebrated a woman he called Fiammetta, little flame, whom tradition identified as Maria d'Aquino, a supposed natural daughter of King Robert. Modern scholarship treats Fiammetta as a literary construction rather than a documented person, but she organized his imagination the way Beatrice organized Dante's and Laura organized Petrarch's ^[3].

His output in this period was remarkable for its range. The Filocolo, begun around 1336, retold the French romance of Floire and Blancheflor in an ambitious Italian prose. The Filostrato recast the Trojan love story of Troilus and Criseida in ottava rima, a stanza form Boccaccio did much to establish, and the Teseida attempted an Italian epic on classical matter. Both narratives later crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Chaucer drew on the Filostrato for Troilus and Criseyde and on the Teseida for the Knight's Tale ^[4].

The collapse of the Bardi bank's fortunes forced Boccaccio back to Florence around 1340 or 1341, an unwelcome return to a city he found mercantile and cramped after Naples. Yet the following decade sharpened him. Works such as the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, the Amorosa visione, the Ninfale fiesolano, and above all the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, a prose monologue in which an abandoned woman narrates her own suffering, showed a writer moving toward psychological realism. The Elegia is often described as an early ancestor of the psychological novel in European literature ^[2].

In 1348 the Black Death reached Florence and killed a large share of its population, probably including Boccaccio's father and stepmother. Out of that catastrophe came the work on which any account of Giovanni Boccaccio achievements must center: the Decameron, composed mainly between about 1349 and 1353 ^[1]. Its frame is simple and unforgettable. Seven young women and three young men withdraw from the plague-stricken city to villas in the countryside, and over ten days each tells a story a day, one hundred tales in all.

The tales range from tragic romance to bawdy farce, from clever merchants and scheming friars to patient wives and quick-witted servants. Boccaccio drew plots from French fabliaux, Latin exempla, oriental story collections, and Florentine street talk, but he transformed them with precise social observation and a prose of unprecedented flexibility ^[5]. The book's opening description of the plague in Florence remains one of the most cited eyewitness-era accounts of the epidemic, valued by historians as well as readers of literature ^[6].

The Decameron's influence is difficult to overstate. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales adopted the frame-story form for English readers, Marguerite de Navarre answered it with the Heptameron, and Renaissance dramatists, Shakespeare among them, mined its plots. In the sixteenth century the scholar Pietro Bembo held up Boccaccio's prose as the model for literary Italian, fixing the Decameron's place at the foundation of the language ^[4]. After it, Boccaccio wrote the Corbaccio, a bitter satire against a widow who had scorned him, a work whose invective against women contrasts sharply with the Decameron's dedication to female readers ^[3].

Boccaccio's later career belonged as much to scholarship and public service as to fiction. Florence employed him repeatedly as an ambassador: records show missions to the lords of the Romagna in 1350, to Ludwig of Brandenburg in the Tyrol in 1351, to Pope Innocent VI at Avignon in 1354 and again in 1365, and to Pope Urban V in Rome in 1367 ^[1]. In 1350 the city also sent him to Ravenna to deliver ten gold florins to Sister Beatrice, the daughter of Dante, a gesture of restitution to the poet Florence had exiled ^[2].

That same year brought the friendship that reoriented his life. In autumn 1350 Petrarch passed through Florence on his way to the Jubilee in Rome, and Boccaccio hosted him. The two corresponded and met for extended visits, in Padua in 1351, Milan in 1359, and Venice in 1363, until Petrarch's death. Under Petrarch's influence Boccaccio turned increasingly to Latin humanist scholarship ^[5].

The results were encyclopedic. The Genealogia deorum gentilium, a genealogy of the pagan gods revised over decades, became the standard mythological reference for European writers well into the Renaissance, and its final books mount a spirited defense of poetry itself. De casibus virorum illustrium traced the falls of famous men from Adam onward, while De mulieribus claris, with more than one hundred lives, was the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted to women ^[6]. Boccaccio also arranged for Leontius Pilatus, a Calabrian Greek, to live in his house and produce the first complete Latin translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and he helped secure Pilatus a teaching post in Greek at the Florentine studium, an early landmark in the Western recovery of Greek learning ^[5].

Boccaccio never married, though documents indicate he fathered several children out of wedlock; a daughter named Violante, who died young, is mourned in one of his Latin eclogues ^[2]. He took minor clerical orders at some point around mid-century, which gave him modest ecclesiastical income without a full priestly career. Money was a lifelong worry. Unlike Petrarch, who lived on patronage, Boccaccio depended on civic salaries, small benefices, and his family property in Certaldo ^[3].

His temperament shows in his letters and late works: affectionate toward friends, prickly about slights, prone to depressions and to sudden religious scruples. Around 1362 a Carthusian monk, Gioacchino Ciani, delivered what Boccaccio took as a deathbed prophecy from the blessed Pietro Petroni, warning him to abandon secular literature. Shaken, Boccaccio considered burning his vernacular writings and selling his library. Petrarch talked him out of it in a famous letter, arguing that learning and piety were compatible, and offering to buy the books himself so they would stay together ^[1].

A visit to Naples in 1362 and 1363, made in hope of a position at the court through the seneschal Niccolò Acciaiuoli, ended in humiliation when the promised welcome proved shabby. He retreated to Venice and Petrarch's household, then home. Facts about Giovanni Boccaccio's appearance rest on his own self-mocking remarks: he grew heavy in later life, and his final years were burdened by dropsy, scabies, and fevers ^[3].

From the mid-1360s Boccaccio lived mostly in Certaldo, in the family house, copying manuscripts, revising the Genealogia, and answering critics of poetry. He remained Florence's elder literary statesman. In 1373 the city commissioned him to deliver the first public lectures ever given on Dante's Divine Comedy, in the church of Santo Stefano di Badia. He began that October and worked through the opening cantos of the Inferno, compiling as he went the commentary known as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia ^[1].

Illness stopped the lectures in early 1375, somewhere around the seventeenth canto. Boccaccio had already written a life of Dante, the Trattatello in laude di Dante, and had copied the Comedy out in his own hand more than once; his editorial and biographical labors did more than anyone else's to secure Dante's reputation in the fourteenth century, and he popularized the epithet divina for the poem ^[4].

Petrarch died in July 1374, and the news wounded Boccaccio deeply; Petrarch's will left him fifty gold florins to buy a warm winter gown for his studies. Boccaccio survived his friend by little more than a year. He died in Certaldo on December 21, 1375, and was buried in the church of Santi Jacopo e Filippo there. His epitaph, which he composed himself, ends by naming his lifelong occupation: his study was gracious poetry ^[2].

Any Giovanni Boccaccio biography ends with an influence that runs in two channels, vernacular and Latin. In Italian, the Decameron gave Europe the model of the framed story collection and gave Italy the model of literary prose. When Bembo codified the language in the 1520s he prescribed Boccaccio for prose as he prescribed Petrarch for verse, and Italian schoolchildren met the Certaldan's sentences for centuries afterward ^[4]. In Latin, his mythographies and biographical compilations equipped Renaissance poets, painters, and preachers with classical material, and De mulieribus claris fed a whole genre of writing about famous women, including Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies ^[6].

His reach in English literature alone is striking. Chaucer reworked three of his poems, Shakespeare took the plot of All's Well That Ends Well and elements of Cymbeline from Decameron tales, and Keats built Isabella, or the Pot of Basil on another. Operas, films, and story cycles have continued the borrowing, from Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1971 film of the Decameron to countless modern retellings during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the book's plague frame found new readers ^[5].

Boccaccio also matters as a founder of scholarship. He hunted manuscripts, reportedly recovering texts of Tacitus from the abbey of Monte Cassino, promoted Greek studies in the Latin West, and invented Dante criticism as a public practice ^[6]. Together with Dante and Petrarch he is honored as one of the tre corone, the three crowns of Florence, and his house in Certaldo, rebuilt after wartime bombing, now serves as a study center and museum maintained by the Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio ^[1].