Alongside Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio is regarded as the most famous Italian author and his major work The Decameron is one of the most influential works of the late middle ages.
Boccaccio was born in 1313 in rural Tuscany, the illegitimate son of a Florentine banker and an unknown woman. Boccaccio would grow up in Florence and received a decent education courtesy of his father’s wealthy new wife. His father was transferred to Naples and Boccaccio initially studied banking but quit to study law. Apparently, Boccaccio didn’t enjoy law either but found a new love in poetry.
The law did however allow Boccaccio to mingle with the city’s wealthy, the local nobility and Naples’ intelligentsia.
In Naples,  Boccaccio wrote Filostrato (the source for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde), Teseida ( the Knight's Tale), and La caccia di Diana.
Boccaccio returned to Florence in early 1341 to write poetry and this period saw him write a number of poems. But the influence of Florence was waning and the city was further marginalized in1348 by the Black Death, which killed some three-quarters of the city's population. While the plague would be an important part of The Decameron, in reality Boccaccio had escaped to Ravenna in 1347 and had missed most of the plague’s ravages.
Boccaccio began work on The Decameron around 1349 and completed it in 1352. It was Boccaccio's final effort in literature and one of his last works in Italian. Boccaccio would revise and rewrite The Decameron in 1370-1371.
From 1350 on, Boccaccio increasingly became a member of the Italian humanist movement and joined the Florentine government. He was sent on a variety of missions to France, Italy and Germany. One duty in 1350 saw Boccaccio welcoming the scholar and poet Petrarch to the city. The meeting led to a lifelong friendship, with Boccaccio calling Petrarch his teacher. Petrarch encouraged Boccaccio to study classical Greek and Latin literature and the result was Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, one of the key reference works on classical mythology.
A failed coup in 1361, resulted in a number of Boccaccio's close friends being executed or exiled. Although implicated in the conspiracy, Boccaccio left Florence to reside in Certaldo, and resigned from governmental duties.
Boccaccio would eventually return to Florence in 1365 and took up the work of more missions. He may have also joined a religious order. His final years were troubled by illnesses, and he died at the age of 63 in Certaldo in 1375, where he is buried today.

The Decameron

The Decameron is a collection of 100 short episodes; bawdy tales of love, jokes, and tragic stories.
The stories are structured around a central narrative framework. It begins with a description of the plague that ravages Florence and a group of seven young women and three young men who flee to a villa in the country. To pass the time, each member of the party tells one story for each one of the nights spent at the villa. Themes are chosen for each night, topics like the power of fortune; human will; human virtue, tragic love stories; love tales that end happily; tricks that women play on men; tricks in general.
While it appears initially to be a collection of unrelated stories it becomes apparent that Boccaccio has a general theme and the stories reinforce Boccaccios ideas about the greed of the clergy, the class of the older nobility and the new wealthy mercantile class, commercial enterprises and the perils of travel. The Black Death had provoked widespread discontent with the church and the Decameron doesn’t miss an opportunity to take satirical swipes at the clergy and the pious.
The name Decameron comes from the Greek Deka (ten) and hemera (days). The urban values of wit, sophistication and intelligence are treasured, while the vices of stupidity and dullness are decried throughout the stories. This ideas highlighted the clash between the new urban elites and traditional rural feudal and monastic orders who greater value on piety and loyalty.
Like Dante, numerology influences the choices of characters. The seven young women are meant to represent the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude) and the Three Theological Virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity), while the three men represent the classical Greek division of the soul (Reason, Spirit, and Lust).