common Italian poets. Describing the tor-
mented jealousy of a young lover, Troilus,
this poem represents the first time any au-
thor had attempted to make the Italian
language, and theoctavoform, an element
of serious literature. Both Geoffrey Chau-
cer and William Shakespeare borrowed the
characters and story ofFilostratoto create
important works.
In 1340, with his father in dire finan-
cial straits due to the bankruptcy of the
Bardi company, Boccaccio returned un-
happily to Florence. There he wroteAmeto,
an allegorical romance interza rima, the
form of three-line stanzas that was em-
ployed by Dante Alighieri inThe Divine
Comedy. With this epic poem, Boccaccio
was maturing as a writer, creating more
serious works with great psychological in-
sight. In theElegy of Lady Fiammettahe
describes the plight of a woman aban-
doned by her lover and overcome by de-
spair. TheNinfale Fiesolanois considered
by many as his finest work of poetry.
Boccaccio traveled to Ravenna in 1346
and returned for a short time to Naples.
By 1348 he was once again in Florence,
where the Black Death—the bubonic
plague that struck Europe in the four-
teenth century—had arrived to claim more
than half the population. The plague in-
spired Boccaccio’sDecameron, a book of
one hundred short tales told by a com-
pany of young men and women who take
refuge in the countryside to avoid the
plague. In theDecamaron, the company
decides on a new theme each day that is
then expounded and explored in stories
told by each person. The stories cover the
entire range of human experience and
emotion; some are lighthearted, bawdy
comedies while others relate the tragic and
serious consequences for all-too-human
desires and weaknesses. The cast of char-
acters includes fools, clowns, heroes, vil-
lains, artists, monks, nobles, and mer-
chants, all subject to the strange whims of
fate and all struggling to apply reason and
prudence to the situations they face.
TheDecameronsoon gained a wide
readership throughout Europe, although
the author himself later stated his regrets
for having written it. In 1350 he hosted
Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, in his
home in Florence. Petrarch, a scholar and
Latin author, had a strong influence on
Boccacio, who had begun an encyclopedic
work on classical mythology. In the fol-
lowing years, at the urging of Petrarch, he
wrote a biography of Dante and helped to
introduce Homer, the ancient Greek au-
thor of theIliadand theOdyssey, to the
readers of Florence. He also wrote a long
series of biographies,On Famous Women
andOn Famous Men. In 1362, a monk re-
lated a prophecy of imminent doom to
the author, who resolved to give up study-
ing and writing in favor of the consola-
tions of religion. In his later years he
served Florence as a public lecturer on the
works of Dante and as an ambassador to
Prussia, Milan, and the papal court at Avi-
gnon. After failing to secure a position at
the court of Naples, he returned to his na-
tive Tuscany to live out his years in the
town of Certaldo.
In the Decameron and his poetry
Boccaccio’s ambition was to make Italian a
literary language—equal to Latin in de-
scriptive and expressive power. Although
he was grounded in the ideas of the medi-
eval period, he abandoned allegory for re-
alism, and the very human outlook of his
works, particularly theDecameron,por-
tends the humanistic outlook of the Re-
naissance, when the traditional forms of
epic poetry and chivalric romance were
gradually left behind for the more per-Boccaccio, Giovanni