Inspirational Quotes by Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian Writer, Poet)

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) was an Italian writer, poet, and humanist. He is recognized as one of the founders of the Italian Renaissance.

Born to a Florentine banking family, Boccaccio turned to write after an unsuccessful start in law. His initial work, the Filocolo (c.1336,) is considered the first European novel.

Boccaccio is most noted for his most exceptional and most influential work, the Decameron (1348–58.) It is a series of 100 novellas told by ten young people living in the country to escape the Black Death epidemic, the devastating pandemic that killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia. Written in vibrant, vernacular prose, the one hundred stories of Decameron were not his creation, but are adaptations of medieval folklore. Decameron exercised a tremendous influence on the development of Renaissance literature.

Decameron become a bedrock of storytelling tradition, mined ever since by Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Molière, Lope de Vega, Christine de Pizan, Jonathan Swift, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Caryl Churchill and others. The story of Giletta of Narbonne was translated by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure (1567) and was used by Shakespeare for his play All’s Well that Ends Well.

Boccaccio’s poetry includes Il Filostrato (c.1338.) He was a friend and student of Francesco Petrarca, and a biographer of Dante Alighieri.

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