Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio died in Certaldo six hundred and fifty years ago, on 21 December 1375. He is regarded as one of the three founding figures – known as the “Three Crowns” – of Italian literature, together with Dante and Petrarch. His most famous work is undoubtedly The Decameron, a collection of frame-tales depicting fourteenth-century society through the stories of a group of young people who retreat to the Florentine hills to escape the plague ravaging the city. The work was adapted for the cinema by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971.