Giovanni Boccaccio was probably born in 1313 in Florence. The illegitimate son of a partner in one of the city’s most important banking companies, the Bardi, he began his life when Florence was well on its way to becoming the capital of international European finance. We know nothing of Boccaccio’s mother, though there has been speculation that she was French. Ignoring the boy’s illegitimacy, his father accepted him into the household and provided him with all the material and moral advantages due to a son of the thriving new middle class at the time. He received a first-rate grammatical education from the notable Giovanni Mazzuoli da Strada. The poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a native of Florence as well, lived in exile during Boccaccio’s day. Already something of a legendary presence in the Florence of Boccaccio’s early childhood, he no doubt helped spark the young boy’s literary imagination. But Boccaccio senior had settled on a serious career in finance for his son. In the latter part of the 1320s, father and son relocated to Naples, site of the most brilliant Italian court of the day (under the reign of a French dynasty, the Anjou) and home to an important branch of the Bardi bank.
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