Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Florentine merchant. His father sent him to Naples to learn commerce and canon law, but amid the elegant life of the Neapolitan court he fell in love with literature. In 1348 the Black Death swept through Florence and carried off more than half its people, and his father died in a later outbreak; that catastrophe is the setting of the Decameron. A close friend of Petrarch and one of Dante's first admirers and commentators, it was he who added the word 'Divine' to Dante's Comedy. With Dante and Petrarch he is one of the 'three crowns' of Italian literature.