A banker's son who hated banking became Europe's greatest prose writer
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 to 1375), Petrarch's friend and one of Italy's Three Crowns alongside Dante, gave up banking and law for literature. His Decameron became the model for Italian prose, and its lively, realistic dialogue shaped writers from Chaucer to Cervantes.
Even his birth is uncertain. He was born either in Florence or in a village near Certaldo, his family's home, to the Florentine merchant Boccaccino di Chellino and an unknown mother, probably outside marriage. He became famous enough to be called simply the Certaldese. He grew up in Florence, where his father worked for the Bardi banking company and in the 1320s married Margherita dei Mardoli, from a comfortable family. A tutor, possibly Giovanni Mazzuoli, may have given the boy his first taste of Dante.
In 1326 his father took charge of a bank in Naples and moved the family there. Giovanni apprenticed at the bank, disliked it, and talked his father into letting him study canon law at the Studium, today's University of Naples, for six years. He liked law no better, but it gave him time to read widely and meet scholars, among them the myth collector Paolo da Perugia, the humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili, and the theologian Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. Through his father he entered the French-flavoured court of King Robert the Wise, and his friend Niccolò Acciaioli, later Grand Seneschal to Queen Joanna I, opened further doors.
Boccaccio wrote his fiction mostly in Tuscan vernacular and other works in Latin. Unlike medieval authors who followed stock patterns for character and plot, he wrote dialogue that sounded real. The scholar Vittore Branca rated him the finest European prose writer of his age, an experimenter who fused genres into something new. He is remembered chiefly for two books: the story collection known as the Decameron and On Famous Women. In the sixteenth century Pietro Bembo held up his style as the pattern for Italian prose.
With Petrarch, his teacher and friend, he helped lay the foundations of humanism in Florence. He also launched the critical study of Dante, copying manuscripts of the Divine Comedy and promoting the poet's reputation. His influence spread to Chaucer, Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Spanish classical theatre, and in the twentieth century Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed the Decameron.
Source: Giovanni Boccaccio
