Character Catalog

A collection of one hundred tales told by ten young people who have fled to the countryside to escape the plague. A masterpiece of Italian prose, it would go on to influence Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the entire European narrative tradition.

A narrative poem in octave stanzas telling the story of Troilus and Criseyde. It directly inspired Chaucer and, through him, Shakespeare.

The first major prose novel in Italian literature, inspired by a French chanson de geste. A testament to Boccaccio's early literary ambitions.

The first Western collection devoted entirely to biographies of famous women, from Antiquity to Boccaccio's own time. A pioneering work that anticipated Renaissance debates on the role of women.

A vast encyclopedia of Greco-Roman mythology in fifteen books. A standard reference for humanist scholars for more than two centuries.

The first biography of Dante Alighieri. Through this work, Boccaccio helped secure official recognition for the Florentine poet and spread knowledge of his writings.

A collection of moral biographies of great figures from Antiquity through Boccaccio's era. Translated into French by Laurent de Premierfait, it had a profound influence on medieval European literature.

In the year of our Lord 1348, in the noble city of Florence, the fairest of all Italian cities, there appeared a deadly pestilence... so many men and women died in that city that it is a terrible thing even to hear it told.

You are my master, you are my light, and if I have ever written anything worthy of being read, it is to you that I owe it, to your lessons and your example.

I thought it would be worthwhile to gather into a single volume the lives of these celebrated women, so that their memory might not fade and that the women of our time might have examples to follow.

Love is a sickness of the soul, a willing madness that turns man away from all virtue and all use of reason.

Poetry is not idle falsehood: it is a science veiled in fictions, and beneath those fictions lie the deepest truths that philosophers have sought to express.

Boccaccio's birthplace and the heart of his intellectual life. It was here that he lived through the plague of 1348 and delivered his famous lectures on Dante in 1373.

Boccaccio lived here from around 1327 to 1340, at the court of King Robert of Anjou. It was here that he met Fiammetta, discovered poetry, and began his earliest works.

The ancestral home of the Boccaccio family. Boccaccio retired here in his later years and died in 1375; his house-museum is now a site of literary remembrance.

The seat of the papacy in the 14th century, Avignon was the political and cultural center of Europe. Boccaccio traveled there on diplomatic missions on behalf of Florence.

The city where Petrarch resided, whom Boccaccio visited on several occasions. These meetings strengthened their friendship and enriched the humanist exchanges of the era.