Art, literature & culture

Death of Giovanni Boccaccio

21 December 1375

Giovanni Boccaccio died on 21 December 1375 in Certaldo, aged about 62. An Italian writer and poet from Florence, Boccaccio grew up in Naples, where he developed his literary interests at the court of King Robert. He is best known for the Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales told by ten young people who have taken refuge in a country villa to escape the Black Death in 1348. Its vivid, often comic and earthy stories of love, trickery and fortune became a model for Italian prose, and influenced later writers such as Chaucer. A friend of Petrarch, he also wrote poems, a biography of Dante and works of scholarship and mythology, helping to spread humanist ideas. He died in Certaldo.

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