Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was the son of a Florentine merchant. He was sent as a boy to Naples to learn banking and studied canon law there, but he turned to poetry, writing Il Filostrato and the Teseida, which Chaucer later reworked in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale. Back in Florence from about 1341, he wrote the Decameron in the years after the Black Death of 1348, which killed his stepmother. From 1350 he was a close friend of Petrarch, served Florence as an envoy, promoted the study of Greek, and wrote Latin works of learning, among them On Famous Women and a genealogy of the pagan gods. He wrote a life of Dante and lectured on the Divine Comedy in Florence in 1373. He died at Certaldo in 1375.
The Decameron is a collection of one hundred tales written in Florentine Italian by Giovanni Boccaccio around 1349 to 1353, just after the Black Death. Its title is Greek for ten days.