by Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was probably born in 1313 in Florence. The illegitimate son of a partner in one of the city’s most important banking companies, the Bardi, he began his life when Florence was well on its way to becoming the capital of international European finance. We know nothing of Boccaccio’s mother, though there has been speculation that she was French. Ignoring the boy’s illegitimacy, his father accepted him into the household and provided him with all the material and moral advantages due to a son of the thriving new middle class at the time. He received a first-rate grammatical education from the notable Giovanni Mazzuoli da Strada. The poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a native of Florence as well, lived in exile during Boccaccio’s day. Already something of a legendary presence in the Florence of Boccaccio’s early childhood, he no...