Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375)

Born in Florence as the illegitimate son of Boccaccio de Chellino, a merchant, Giovanni Boccaccio felt a strong ambition to become a poet from a young age. His father was employed by the Bardi banking house; he tutored his son in Latin and intended to make him a man of business. In about 1328 father and son traveled to Naples, where Giovanni trained as a banker while his father served the king as an adviser in financial matters. This apprenticeship lasted six years and left Boccaccio with an ever-stronger desire to study classical literature and write poetry. Through his father's position at the Neopolitan court he met philosophers, writers, and scientists, and also developed expertise in the subject of classical mythology.

Boccaccio found an early inspiration in his unrequited love for a young noblewoman, whom he first saw on Holy Saturday 1336 in the Church of San Lorenzo in Naples. Named Fiammetta in his works, she was the daughter of the king of Naples, whose high-born position and marriage drove Boccaccio to write Fiametta Amoroso, an account of his frustrated passion. He also wrote Filocolo, a medieval romance on unrequited love that describes in vivid detail the people and society of Naples.

Although he was schooled in the classics and in Latin and Greek, Boccaccio felt at home in his native tongue and with the popular poetic forms of Italy. His Filostrato is a long poem composed in octavo, an eight-line scheme from the island of Sicily that was popular with singers and common Italian poets. Describing the tormented jealousy of a young lover, Troilus, this poem represents the first time any author had attempted to make the Italian language, and the octavo form, an element of serious literature. Both Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare borrowed the characters and story of Filostrato to create important works.

In 1340, with his father in dire financial straits due to the bankruptcy of the Bardi company, Boccaccio returned unhappily to Florence. There he wrote Ameto, an allegorical romance in terza rima, the form of three-line stanzas that was employed by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy. With this epic poem, Boccaccio was maturing as a writer, creating more serious works with great psychological insight. In the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta he describes the plight of a woman abandoned by her lover and overcome by despair. The Ninfale Fiesolano is considered by many as his finest work of poetry.

Boccaccio traveled to Ravenna in 1346 and returned for a short time to Naples. By 1348 he was once again in Florence, where the Black Death—the bubonic plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century—had arrived to claim more than half the population. The plague inspired Boccaccio's Decameron, a book of one hundred short tales told by a company of young men and women who take refuge in the countryside to avoid the plague. In the Decamaron, the company decides on a new theme each day that is then expounded and explored in stories told by each person. The stories cover the entire range of human experience and emotion; some are lighthearted, bawdy comedies while others relate the tragic and serious consequences for all-too-human desires and weaknesses. The cast of characters includes fools, clowns, heroes, villains, artists, monks, nobles, and merchants, all subject to the strange whims of fate and all struggling to apply reason and prudence to the situations they face.

The Decameron soon gained a wide readership throughout Europe, although the author himself later stated his regrets for having written it. In 1350 he hosted Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, in his home in Florence. Petrarch, a scholar and Latin author, had a strong influence on Boccacio, who had begun an encyclopedic work on classical mythology. In the following years, at the urging of Petrarch, he wrote a biography of Dante and helped to introduce Homer, the ancient Greek author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the readers of Florence. He also wrote a long series of biographies, On Famous Women and On Famous Men. In 1362, a monk related a prophecy of imminent doom to the author, who resolved to give up studying and writing in favor of the consolations of religion. In his later years he served Florence as a public lecturer on the works of Dante and as an ambassador to Prussia, Milan, and the papal court at Avignon. After failing to secure a position at the court of Naples, he returned to his native Tuscany to live out his years in the town of Certaldo.

In the Decameron and his poetry Boccaccio's ambition was to make Italian a literary language—equal to Latin in descriptive and expressive power. Although he was grounded in the ideas of the medieval period, he abandoned allegory for realism, and the very human outlook of his works, particularly the Decameron, portends the humanistic outlook of the Renaissance, when the traditional forms of epic poetry and chivalric romance were gradually left behind for the more personal expression of plays, lyric poetry, and novels.

See Also: Dante Alighieri; Florence; humanism; Petrarch