Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was an Italian writer, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant, who spent his youth at the court of Naples and returned to Florence shortly before the Black Death of 1348. The Decameron, finished around 1353, turns that plague into the frame for a hundred stories told by ten young people in a villa outside the city, and it became the model for prose fiction in every European language. He was a close friend of Petrarch, a pioneer of humanist scholarship, and the first public lecturer on Dante, whose poem he was the first to call divine.