Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, which is both a masterpiece of European storytelling and the most-quoted eyewitness description of the Black Death. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine banker, sent to Naples to learn the business and then canon law, and did neither: the Angevin court there gave him the aristocratic and mercantile world he spent his life writing about. He was in Florence in 1348 when the plague arrived, and his father and stepmother died in it. The Decameron opens with a description of the city that historians still use - the swollen buboes the size of an egg, the bodies left on doorsteps, the pigs dying after nosing the rags of the dead, the collapse of the rule that families bury their own - and then does something stranger. Ten young people leave the dying city for a villa in the hills and tell each other a hundred stories over ten days, most of them comic, many of them obscene, almost none of them about the plague. It is a book about narrative as the thing that survives catastrophe. He wrote in the vernacular, which was a choice, and his prose became a model for Italian in the way Dante's verse had been. He knew Petrarch, who disapproved of the Decameron and admired the rest, and he spent his last years on Latin scholarship, a Latin encyclopaedia of classical myth, and public lectures on Dante. Chaucer read him. So did everyone after. He was appointed by Florence to lecture publicly on the Divine Comedy in 1373, the first such appointment anywhere, and it is largely his doing that Dante was read as a classic rather than a recent poet. He also wrote the first biography of him.

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