Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio: A Hundred Stories Against the Plague

In 1348 the Black Death reached Florence and killed roughly three-quarters of the population. Giovanni Boccaccio's response, begun the following year, was not a lament. It was a frame story in which ten young Florentines flee the dying city for a villa in the hills and pass the time telling each other a hundred tales — bawdy, cynical, funny, occasionally brutal, mostly about ordinary people outwitting their betters. He had it substantially finished by 1352. The *Decameron* is the founding document of European prose fiction, and it was written by a man who had watched a city die.

An Illegitimate Son of the Bardi Bank

He was born in 1313 — the sources disagree over whether in June or in high summer, and over whether in Florence or near Certaldo — the son of Boccaccino di Chellino, a wealthy Florentine merchant, and a woman whose name is unknown. He was almost certainly illegitimate, and his father openly acknowledged him. That combination, respectable enough to be educated and irregular enough to sit slightly outside the social order, is visible everywhere in his fiction's amused attention to who is really in charge of what.

His education was the merchant class's own: liberal arts, Latin grammar, and enough commercial training to be useful. His father worked for the Compagnia dei Bardi, one of the great banking houses of the age.

Naples: Court, Counting-House, and Canon Law

In 1326 Boccaccino was made a bank director and moved the family to Naples, where the Bardi handled business at the court of King Robert of Anjou. The boy was thirteen. He was apprenticed to the bank, hated it, and talked his father into letting him study canon law at the Studium instead — six years of it, under Cino da Pistoia, while doing as little law and as much literature as he could manage.

Naples gave him three worlds at once: the court, the counting-house and the world of letters, plus entry to the Neapolitan aristocracy through connections such as Nicola Acciaiuoli. The early works came out of it — *La caccia di Diana* (1334–37), *Filocolo* (1336–39), *Teseida* (1339–40) and *Filostrato*, completed around 1340. The last two would be quarried by Geoffrey Chaucer.

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He returned to Florence in 1341, writing *Amorosa visione* in 1342 and *The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta* in 1343. Then the plague arrived.

The Plague, and a Hundred Tales

What makes the *Decameron* extraordinary is not the individual stories, many of which he took from circulating material — French, Italian and Latin sources, some of them centuries old, some originating in India, the Middle East and Spain, all of them updated to a contemporary setting. What is extraordinary is the machine he built to hold them. Ten narrators shelter in a villa outside Florence to escape the plague: seven women — Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile and Elissa — and three men, Panfilo, Filostrato and Dioneo. Each tells one story a night across ten days of storytelling, producing exactly a hundred tales. A different narrator rules each day as King or Queen and sets its theme: the power of fortune, tragic love, happy love, clever replies, tricks played by wives on husbands. Dioneo, on account of his wit, is granted the standing privilege of ignoring the theme entirely.

It is a formal invention of the first order. The frame lets a writer move between registers — obscene, pious, tragic, farcical — without the book losing coherence, because the coherence lives in the structure rather than in the tone.

He was still revising it in 1370–71, more than twenty years after starting, and the manuscript of that late revision survives.

Petrarch, and the Turn to Latin

In 1350 he met Petrarch in Florence, and the meeting redirected the rest of his life. He called Petrarch his *magister* — his teacher — visited him at Padua, Milan, Venice and Arquà, and corresponded with him until Petrarch's death in 1374. Under that influence Boccaccio turned from Italian storytelling to Latin scholarship.

The results were formidable and, in their day, more famous than the *Decameron*. *De casibus virorum illustrium*, begun in 1355, collected moralised biographies of the fallen great. *De mulieribus claris* assembled 106 biographies of famous women, a collection with no obvious precedent. The *Genealogia deorum gentilium*, begun around 1350 and finished in 1374, systematised classical mythology and mounted a defence of pagan literature; it remained a standard reference work for more than four hundred years.

Bringing Back Greek

Boccaccio did something else that is easy to underrate. Greek had effectively vanished from Western Europe. He housed the scholar Leontius Pilatus and pushed him to translate Homer, Euripides and Aristotle into Latin — an act of direct patronage that helped reopen a language the West had lost. After 1361 he withdrew increasingly to Certaldo to work.

Dante's First Public Lecturer

In 1373 the city of Florence commissioned him to give public lectures on Dante's *Divine Comedy* at the church of Santo Stefano. It was the first time the poem had been treated as an object of formal public exposition — the beginning of Dante studies as a discipline. Illness stopped the series after a few months, but the lectures became his last major work, the *Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante*.

Why Giovanni Is Called a Genius

The specific achievement is structural and it is unusually easy to identify. Boccaccio did not invent the stories in the *Decameron*; he invented the container. Setting a hundred tales inside a frame of plague-flight, dividing them among ten distinct narrators over ten days under rotating thematic rule, he solved a problem nobody had solved: how to give a miscellany of short fiction the unity and momentum of a single long work. The debts are traceable and enormous: *The Canterbury Tales* is unthinkable without it, Shakespeare took the ninth tale of the third day for *All's Well That Ends Well*, Lope de Vega adapted a dozen stories for the stage, and Molière, Lessing, Keats and Tennyson all drew on individual tales. Britannica's judgment is that Boccaccio, with Petrarch, "laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance and raised vernacular literature to the level and status of the classics of antiquity" — the second half of which is his alone, and is the point.

The counter-case is worth stating. Contemporaries and the following two centuries valued him chiefly for the Latin encyclopaedias, which are now genuinely unread; the *Genealogia* was a compiler's triumph rather than an original one. As a poet he is not in Dante's class, and he knew it — he spent his last years in Dante's service. Much of the *Decameron*'s raw material was borrowed. The honest summary is that he was a middling poet, a diligent scholar, and a structural innovator of the very first rank.

Certaldo

He died at Certaldo on 21 December 1375, a year after Petrarch, and is buried there. His library went to the monastery of Santo Spirito in Florence. He remains one of the Three Crowns of Italian literature, alongside Dante and Petrarch, and the one whose central innovation is still in daily use: every set of linked tales told by a company of narrators is running on a design he drew during a plague year.