As the scion (however illegitimate) of a prominent and prosperous citizen of Florence, Giovanni receives a sound education: by age six, he is taught to read and write, entrusted to a private tutor, Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli da Strada our Giovanni also learns to spell from the children's psalm-book and already as a child, like his own characters Florio and Biancifiore, protagonists of Filocolo, he studies grammar (Latin) on Ovid. 1322-24īoccaccino is a consul (or main officer) of the Arte del Cambio (the influential Guild of the moneychangers and money lenders) and in the same year he is among the City Priors, the highest elective office of the commune, for the customary two-month term. Margherita's family boasted ancestral connection with the family of Dante's Beatrice, the beautiful daughter of Folco Portinari, a cousin of Lippa de' Mardoli, Margherita's mother, and thus Giovanni himself could claim to be a distant relative of the great poet he so admired and celebrated in his writings throughout his life. Boccaccino marries Margherita de' Mardoli, noblewoman who gave him another son, Francesco, Giovanni's half-brother, born in 1320. 1319-20īoccaccio spent his childhood in Florence, in the House of San Pier Maggiore - with a few trips to the countryside, to Certaldo.
That his mother was most likely not a Parisian but a Florentine is indirectly confirmed by the fact that Boccaccino's trip to Paris happened in late 1313 and Giovanni was already born, in July or August of the same year.
Biographers in the 19th-century gave some currency to the romantic tale of Giovanni's birth from his father's supposed affair with a king's daughter, in far away Paris.
In the same year, it appears from some documents (the Parisian livre de la Taille, a sort of tax and fee ledger) that Boccaccino and his brother were in Paris for business, lodging near the church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. the fact that he was born of "mother unknown." In 1313, the Boccacci are among the official residents of the San Pier Maggiore quarter, one of the centers of Florentine mercantile life. Questa pagina è disponibile anche in italiano Boccaccio's Life and Works 1313īoccaccio is born (July or August) in Certaldo or in Florence to an unknown woman and Boccaccino di Chellino, a wealthy merchant who officially and without hesitation recognizes him: an official document, dated Novemwith which Pope Innocent VI confers to Giovanni, then a Florentine ambassador at his court, the canonicatus, in other words ordains him as a priest specifically mentions his "birth-defect" ("super defectu natalium"), i.e.
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