The illegitimate son of a merchant, raised among account books and bills of exchange, Giovanni Boccaccio had nothing that would mark him for literary glory. Yet it was he who wrote the work that would give Italian prose its definitive form, and which still lives on in the language we speak today.
In this documentary, we retrace the entire human and intellectual journey of one of the three great authors of the Italian fourteenth century, from his birth in 1313 to his death in Certaldo in 1375.
The story spans his Neapolitan years at the Angevin court, his mercantile apprenticeship imposed by his father, and the discovery of the royal library; the enigmatic figure of Fiammetta, between documentary reality and literary invention; his return to Florence after the collapse of the Bardi Company, and the birth of the Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta, the first European novel narrated in the first person by a female voice.
At the heart of the journey is the Black Death of 1348 and the genesis of the Decameron: one hundred short stories told over ten days by ten young men taking refuge in a garden a few miles from a city devastated by the plague. We analyze the structure of the work, the themes of each day, the characters who have remained in the collective memory—Ser Ciappelletto, Andreuccio da Perugia, Ghismonda, Federigo degli Alberighi, Calandrino—and the author's defense against accusations of immorality.
The video also reconstructs his relationship with Francesco Petrarca, which spanned twenty-five years, amidst intellectual collaboration and profound disagreement over the value of the vernacular; his cult of Dante and the first public readings of the Divine Comedy; the spiritual crisis of 1362, when Boccaccio contemplated destroying his own works; and his great scholarly achievements in his later years, including the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods and the first collection of female biographies in Western literature.
The final section is dedicated to the legacy: Pietro Bembo and the Prose della volgar lingua, the sixteenth-century censorship and refinements, the Hamilton Codex 90, and the decisive impact this work had on the formation of literary Italian.
The content is based on historical sources and consolidated studies on the author. The issues still debated—the place of birth, Fiammetta's identity, the dating of some works—are presented, highlighting the different interpretations proposed by scholars.
Channel edited by Marco Valenti.
Series: Storie di Creatori—documentary biographies of authors, artists, and thinkers who changed culture.
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