The Decameron.

Giovanni Boccaccio

Faithfully Translated by J.M. Rigg

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Giovanni Boccaccio ( June 16, 1313 – December 21, 1375) was a Florentine author and poet, the greatest of Petrarch’s disciples, an important Renaissance humanist in his own right and author of a number of notable works including OnFamous Women, the Decameron and his poems in the vernacular.
The exact details of his birth are uncertain. He was almost certainly a bastard, the son of a Florentine banker and an unknown woman. An early biographer claimed his mother was a Parisien and that the city was also the place of his birth, this has been largely depreciated as a romanticism and his place of birth is more likely to have been in Tuscany, perhaps in Certaldo, the
town of his father.
Boccaccio grew up in Florence. His father was working for the Compagnia dei Bardi and in the 1320s married Margherita del Mardoli, of an illustrious family. It is believed Boccaccio was tutored by Giovanni Mazzuoli and received from him an early introduction to the works of Dante. Around 1327 Boccaccio moved to Naples when his father was appointed to head the
Neopolitan branch of his bank, Boccaccio was apprenticed to the bank and spent six years there. It was a trade for which he had no affinity and he eventually persuaded his father to let him study law at the Studium in the city.
However, his father had introduced him into the Neopolitan nobility and the French-influenced court of Robert the Wise. Boccaccio had become a friend of fellow-Florentine Nicola Acciaiuoli and benefitted from his influence as lover of Catherine of Valois, later counsellor to Queen Joanna and the “Grand Seneschal”.

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