Giovanni Villani, a contemporary of Boccaccio and chronicler, states that he was born in Paris as a consequence of an illicit relation but others denounce this as a romanticism by the earliest biographers.

He states that it is harmful to place young girls into convents while they are “ ignorant, or young, or under coercion .” Boccaccio states that girls should be “ well brought up from childhood in the parental home, taught honesty and praiseworthy behavior, and then, when they are grown and with their entire mind know what of their own free will ” choose the life of monasticism.

Petrarch mentions having heard it many years before, but not from Boccaccio.

It is believed Boccaccio was tutored by Giovanni Mazzuoli and received from him an early introduction to the works of Dante.

Boccaccio became a friend of fellow Florentine Niccolò Acciaioli, and benefited from his influence as the administrator, and perhaps the lover, of Catherine of Valois-Courtenay, widow of Philip I of Taranto.

Giovanni Boccaccio and Florentines who have fled from the plague.

The meeting between the two was extremely fruitful and they were friends from then on, Boccaccio calling Petrarch his teacher and magister.

Despite the Pagan beliefs at its core, Boccaccio believed that much could be learned from antiquity.

Certain sources also see a conversion of Boccaccio by Petrarch from the open humanist of the Decameron to a more ascetic style, closer to the dominant fourteenth century ethos.

He returned to work for the Florentine government in 1365, undertaking a mission to Pope Urban V. When the papacy returned to Rome from Avignon in 1367, Boccaccio was again sent to Urban, offering congratulations.

Petrarch then dissuaded Boccaccio from burning his own works and selling off his personal library, letters, books, and manuscripts.

" Boccaccio reading from the Decameron to Queen Johanna of Naples ", by Egide Charles Gustave Wappers | Gustaf Wappers ( 1803-1874 ), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium | Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium

In the 1340s, Violente was born in Ravenna, where Boccaccio was a guest of Ostasio I da Polenta from about 1345 through 1346.

Illustration from The Fall of Princes by John Lydgate ( which is a translation of De Casibus Virorum Illustribus by Giovanni Boccaccio ) depicting " the skyn of Julyan ".

He encouraged and advised Leontius Pilatus's translation of Homer from a manuscript purchased by Boccaccio, although he was severely critical of the result.

Petrarch confessed to Boccaccio that he had never read the Commedia, remarks Contini, wondering whether this was true or Petrarch wanted to distance himself from Dante.

Boccaccio could have possibly also taken the tale from a French fabliau, " L ' Evesque qui benit sa maitresse " (" The bishop who blesses his mistress ").

Boccaccio took this story directly from Cento Novelle Antiche, in which the male character is also the King of Cyprus.

There is no agreement on its origin, probably because of the very eclectic nature of the plot, which may have been pieced together from various sources by Boccaccio.

Boccaccio, though, may have directly taken the tale from The Seven Wise Masters, which, although oriental in origin, was widely circulating in Latin at the time the Decameron was written.

Lauretta's tale of the elaborate ruses that an abbot undertakes to enjoy Ferondo's wife was probably taken by Boccaccio from a French fabliau by Jean de Boves called.

Boccaccio may have taken the tale from an 11th century French version.

However, the tale was a widespread one and Boccaccio could have taken it from any number of sources or even oral tradition.

Although we will never know if Boccaccio really did hear the story from an old woman or not ( it is possible ), the story is certainly not true.

Filostrato narrates this tale, which Boccaccio certainly took from Apuleius's The Golden Ass, the same source as tale V, 10.

Chaucer borrowed from the same fabliau as Boccaccio did.

Filomena narrates this story, which Boccaccio may have taken from Alphonsus's " Disciplina clericalis.

Boccaccio married Margherita di Gian Donato de ' Martoli in 1314 ( when he was just one year old ) who bore him a legitimate son, Francesco.

This story seems to originate in the Panchatantra, a work originally composed in Sanskrit, and was already 1500 years old by the time Boccaccio retold it.

Castiglione declined to imitate Boccaccio and write in Tuscan Italian, as was customary at the time ; instead he wrote in the Italian used in his native Lombardy ( he was born near Mantua ): as the Count says, “ certainly it would require a great deal of effort on my part if in these discussions of ours I wished to use those old Tuscan words which the Tuscans of today have discarded ; and what ’ s more I ’ m sure you would all laugh at me ” ( Courtier 70 ).

The Divina Commedia was sent him by Boccaccio, when he was an old man, and he confessed that he never read it.

It was not until Giovanni Boccaccio brought the manuscript of the Annals 11-16 and the Histories out of Monte Cassino to Florence, in the 1360s or 1370s, that Tacitus began to regain some of his old literary importance.

The contemporary writer Giovanni Boccaccio has left us with the following description of Queen Joanna in his On Famous Women: " Joanna, queen of Sicily and Jerusalem, is more renowned than other woman of her time for lineage, power, and character ".

* The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta ( c. 1345 ) by Giovanni Boccaccio, describes the ravages of love at first sight on a woman

* The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo ( who, in his Gli Asolani, claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio ).

Petrarch's will ( dated April 4, 1370 ) leaves 50 florins to Boccaccio " to buy a warm winter dressing gown "; various legacies ( a horse, a silver cup, a lute, a Madonna ) to his brother and his friends ; his house in Vaucluse to its caretaker ; for his soul, and for the poor ; and the bulk of his estate to his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, who is to give half of it to " the person to whom, as he knows, I wish it to go "; presumably his daughter, Francesca, Brossano's wife.

The last two are the most probable sources for Boccaccio because in them the father refers to the women as " geese ," whereas in the earlier versions he calls them " demons " who tempt the souls of men.

In Shakespeare's own lifetime, a writer known for doing likewise was Matteo Bandello, who based his work on that of writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and who could have served as an indirect source for Shakespeare.

The same name was also used by Florentines, such as the poet Fazio degli Uberti ( circa 1309 – 1367 ), the famous chronicler Giovanni Villani ( c. 1275 – 1348 ), and Giovanni Boccaccio ( 1313 – 1375 ), who wrote that the Brenta River rises from the mountains of Carantania, a land in the Alps dividing Italy from Germany.

Treatise on the Astrolabe addressed to his son Lowys AD 1391. As the Franklin says in his prologue, his story is in the form of a Breton lai, although it is in fact based on a work by the Italian poet and author Boccaccio ( Filocolo 1336 retold in the 1350s as the 5th tale on the 10th day of the Decameron ) in which a young knight called Tarolfo falls in love with a lady married to another knight, extracts a promise to satisfy his desire if he can create a flowering Maytime garden in winter, meets a magician Tebano who performs the feat using spells, but releases her from the rash promise when he learns of her husband's noble response.

Parlamente suggests that those who want to write stories after the manner of Boccaccio, do so, sharing them with the others in the afternoon, after Scriptures are read in the morning.

It is Boccaccio who makes the decisive shift in the character's name in Il Filostrato.

Boccaccio for example, in his Il Filostrato, mixes the tradition of Cupid's arrow with the Provençal emphasis on the eyes as the birthplace of love: " Nor did he ( Troilus ) who was so wise shortly before ... perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes ... nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart.

The first known version is from Benoît de Sainte-Maure's poem Roman de Troie, but Chaucer's principal source appears to have been Boccaccio who re-wrote the tale in his Il Filostrato.

The town has served historically as a destination for artists, musicians, and writers, including Richard Wagner, Edvard Grieg, M. C. Escher, Giovanni Boccaccio, Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo, Gore Vidal, André Gide, Joan Mirò, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Graham Greene, Leonard Bernstein and Sara Teasdale ( who mentioned it in her prefatory dedication in Love Songs ).

The scripts of the films were also Trnka's own work, who often used works of Czech authors ( many of them related to popular folklore ), as well as classics of world literature, such as Chekhov, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare.

Boccaccio claimed to have written the 106 biographies for the posterity of the women who were considered renowned, whether good or bad.

Boccaccio became famous principally for the Italian work, Decamerone, a collection of a hundred novels, related by a party of men and women who retired to a villa near Florence to escape the plague in 1348.

Unlike Petrarch, who was always discontented, preoccupied, wearied with life, disturbed by disappointments, we find Boccaccio calm, serene, satisfied with himself and with his surroundings.

A third novelist was Giovanni Sercambi of Lucca, who after 1374 wrote a book, in imitation of Boccaccio, about a party of people who were supposed to fly from a plague and to go travelling about in different Italian cities, stopping here and there telling stories.

The copies of Annals at Monte Cassino were likely moved to Florence by Giovanni Boccaccio ( 1313 – 1375 ), a friend of da Strada, who is also credited with their discovery at Monte Cassino.

It was the home of the family of Giovanni Boccaccio, who died and was buried here in 1375.

Boccaccio provides one of the most memorable examples in his Il Filostrato, where he mixes the tradition of love at first sight, the eye's darts, and the metaphor of Cupid's arrow: " Nor did he ( Troilus ) who was so wise shortly before ... perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes ... nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart.