Giovanni Boccaccio

Born in 1313 in Tuscany, Giovanni Boccaccio became one of the great writers of early Renaissance Italy. He spent part of his youth in Naples, where he was exposed to court life, literature, and the wider world of trade and learning. Although his father pushed him toward business and law, he turned instead to writing.

He is most famous for The Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales told by a group of young people sheltering outside plague-stricken Florence. The book moves easily between comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire, and its vivid storytelling made it a landmark of Italian prose. Alongside Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio is often seen as one of the key figures who raised Italian literature to lasting importance.

Later in life, he also devoted himself to scholarship and to the study of classical learning, becoming an important humanist. He was a friend and correspondent of Petrarch, wrote in both Italian and Latin, and remained deeply engaged with literature until his death in Certaldo in 1375.