About author Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio, (1313-75), Italian writer, born in Paris, the illegitimate son of Boccaccio Di Chellino, A Florentine merchant, and a French nobleman reared in Florence. Boccaccio was sent about 1323 to study accounting in Naples. Giovanni Boccaccio abandoned accounting for canon law, and this for classical and scientific studies, and took part in the gay life of Robert d,Anjou, King of Naples. The illegitimate daughter of Robert, Maria de Conti d, Aquino, became his mistress and inspired a great deal of his work; she is immortalized in his writings as "Fiammetta".
About 1340 Giovanni Boccaccio settled in Florence, where he performed various diplomatic services for the government of the city and met the celebrated Italian poet Petrarch, with whom he kept a close friendship until Petrarch, s death in 1374. In 1362 Giovanni Boccaccio was invited to Naples by a friend, who promised him the patronage of Queen Joanne of that city. A cold reception at the Queen’s court led him to seek the hospitality of Petrarch, who was then in Venice (1363). Rejecting Patriarch’s offer of a home, however, he returned to his Certaldo estate. His last years, in which he turned to religious meditation, were brightened by his appointment as lecturer on the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in Florence in 1373, but his series of lectures was interrupted by illness in 1374, and Giovanni Boccaccio died the next year.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s most important work is the Decameron, written between 1348 and 1353. This witty and high-spirited collection of tales, the first prose masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, holds a high place in world literature, and has established Giovanni Boccaccio as one of the greatest writers of all time. |
