BU Mint Set

Giovanni Boccaccio was a writer, scholar and diplomat. He spent formative years in Naples, where at the court of Anjou he came into contact with courtly literature and classical subjects. He later lived mainly in Florence and Certaldo. Alongside Italian-language narratives, he wrote works in Latin, studied classical authors and collected manuscripts. He is therefore considered part of Italy’s early humanist culture, which rediscovered classical texts while establishing the vernacular as a literary language.

His best-known work is the “Decameron”. Its framework is the plague of 1348: seven young women and three young men leave Florence to escape the epidemic. During their stay outside the city, they tell a total of one hundred stories over ten days. These deal, among other things, with love, fortune and misfortune, social advancement, deception, wit and religious hypocrisy. Figures from different social groups appear as independently acting human beings. The combination of a clearly structured framework with a variety of novellas shaped European narrative literature.

Boccaccio was in close intellectual exchange with Francesco Petrarca. Together with Petrarca and Dante Alighieri, he is traditionally counted among the “three crowns” of Italian literature. Boccaccio was particularly committed to Dante’s work: he wrote a biography of the poet and gave public lectures in Florence on the “Divine Comedy” (“Göttliche Komödie”). The designation “divine” for Dante’s poetry also became widespread through Boccaccio’s tribute.

The portrait used as the model originally belonged to Andrea del Castagno’s fresco cycle of famous men and women in the Villa Carducci near Florence. Boccaccio appears in it as part of a historical and literary canon of remembrance.

The choice of the anniversary thus refers to Boccaccio’s position in the history of the Italian language and literature. At the same time, it commemorates Florence and Tuscany as centres of the literary culture from which the later standard Italian developed.