Giovanni Boccaccio

Florence's storyteller: the Decameron's hundred tales made Italian prose a literary instrument.

Specifications & Metrics

era

1313 – 1375

language

Italian (Tuscan) and Latin

region

Florence and Certaldo, Italy

notable works

The Decameron, On Famous Women, The Corbaccio

Core Principles & Analysis

• The Decameron's frame turns the Black Death's horror into comic flight.
• He was an early sonneteer and a Latin scholar of Dante and Petrarch.
• His On Famous Women pioneered collective biography of women.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Boccaccio