Villani

The Villani were an old merchant family of Florence, enrolled among the greater guilds of the city. Its most famous son, Giovanni Villani, born around 1280, joined the Arte di Calimala in 1300; he served the Peruzzi bank across Italy, France and Flanders, later became a director of the Buonaccorsi company, and was chosen a prior of Florence.

After attending the jubilee in Rome in 1300 he began the Nuova Cronica, a year-by-year chronicle of Florence rich in economic and statistical detail. The collapse of the Buonaccorsi firm brought him imprisonment in 1346, and he died of the Black Death in 1348.

His brother Matteo, the Buonaccorsi representative in Naples, added eleven more books before dying of plague in 1363, and Matteo's son Filippo briefly carried the work on.