Certaldo or Firenze ?

Giovanni Boccaccio’s birth place has long been contended between Florence and Certaldo, the place his father’s family was from. The only certainty is that this natural son of Boccaccio (or Boccaccino) from Chelino, a rich merchant in Florence, took place between June and July 1313.

Nothing is known about his mother, whose obscurity has led to many a legend, like the one about Boccaccio’s Parisian origin and his mother’s blue blood, as she was by some presumed to be a daughter of the King of France.  It was Giovanni himself who disseminated his works with allusive and contrasting autobiographical clues, initiating a process of idealisation about his life  that is probably at the root of his romance biography. Above all romantic and positivist readers thought that they could trace autobiographical elements in his works, to the extent that they confirmed the hypothesis of a fabulous existence, a feature today much toned down.

Giovanni was welcomed into his father’s home at an early age and was legitimised before Boccaccino married Margherita de’ Mardoli, sometime before 1320. His father, a rich and influential merchant linked to the Florentine company of the Bardi, very much wanted Giovanni to become a merchant like himself, as Boccaccio also recalls in a famous autobiographical piece  (Genealogie: XV, X, 7[1]). Giovanni however produced meagre results in the trade his father so wanted him to undertake, wanting his son to become a businessman at any price.  He achieved better results in his studies in letters, which he began at the age of six with the rudiments of Latin. These were imparted to him by the Florentine grammarian Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli from Strada, the father of the more famous Zanobi, with whom Boccaccio was to go to school and also correspond.

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[1]Genealogie deorum gentilium, ed. V. Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Ed. V. Branca, vol. 7-8.2, Milan 1998, pp. 1560-1566.