Giovanni Boccaccio

An Italian writer, poet and important Renaissance humanist, ranked with Dante Alighieri and Petrarch as one of the Three Crowns of Italian literature (both already catalogued in this atlas). His masterwork, the Decameron, gathers one hundred tales told by ten narrators fleeing plague-stricken Florence inside a single frame narrative, the lieta brigata of three men and seven women; the work became foundational to the Italian storytelling tradition and influenced Chaucer, Cervantes and Lope de Vega. He corresponded closely with Petrarch from 1350 onward and also wrote On Famous Women and the Genealogia deorum gentilium, a major reference work on classical mythology.