Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was a Florentine writer and humanist, ranked with Dante and Petrarch among the three crowns of Italian literature and best known for The Decameron. The son of a merchant, he moved to Naples in 1326, and at King Robert the Wise's court took up poetry, writing Il Filostrato and Teseida.

He returned to Florence in early 1341. The Black Death of 1348, which killed some three-quarters of Florence's people, frames The Decameron, a hundred tales told by ten young people, begun around 1349 and largely finished by 1352. He welcomed Petrarch to Florence in 1350 and called him his teacher.

His Genealogia deorum gentilium (1360) defended the study of pagan antiquity and long remained a standard mythology work. He lectured on Dante in 1373 and died at Certaldo in 1375, leaving his library to a Florentine monastery.