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Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375 |
In 1358 he completed his great work, the Decameron, begun some ten years before. During the plague at Florence in 1348, seven ladies and three gentlemen left the city for a country villa and over a period of ten days told one hundred stories. In graceful Italian, Boccaccio selected the plots of his stories from the popular fiction of his day, and especially from the fabliaux which had passed into Italy from France, the matter being medieval while the form is classical. Boccaccio's originality lay in his narrative skill and in the rich poetical sentiments which adorns his borrowed materials. The two great tendencies which run through European literature, the classical and the romantic, work together in the Decameron. The influence of the Decameron on European literature has been lasting, not merely in Italy, but in France and England. Chaucer and Shakespeare both borrowed from it. The Decameron has also been the subject of poems by Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Swinburne and George Eliot. During his last years Boccaccio lived principally in retirement at Certaldo, and would have entered into holy orders, moved by repentance for the follies of his youth, had he not been dissuaded by Petrarch. Boccaccio died at Certaldo, December 21, 1375. The best Internet resource on Boccaccio is The Decameron Web at Brown University. | The History Guide | | copyright © 2000 Steven Kreis |