Subject Area
Humanities
Description
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), born in Certaldo, Tuscany, is one of the tre corone (Three Crowns) of Italian Literature. He shares this distinction with Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), about whose life and literary works he wrote treatises and delivered lectures, and Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), with whom he formed a lasting friendship (beginning in 1350). All three wrote widely acclaimed literature in the Florentine-Tuscan dialect of Italian, enabling it to become the basis for standard Italian. In addition to elevating the Italian vernacular as a literary language, they prioritized Classical Studies and were forerunners of the Italian humanist movement (c.1400–1600). Today, Boccaccio is best remembered as the Father of Italian Prose owing to the immense popularity of his Decameron (c.1349–51), a collection of one hundred short stories in Italian prose embedded in a narrative frame of a storytelling game undertaken by seven young women and three young men who fled Florence for Fiesole in hopes of escaping the Black Death.
Publication Date
8-2026
Type
Article
Language
English
