Literary apprenticeship

After his father had been appointed head of the powerful Bardi merchant company in Naples, Boccaccio followed his family to the city that was then the capital of the Angevin realm, where he stayed from 1327 till 1340-41.

The youth was very much taken by the elegant court, where he was particularly well accepted thanks to Boccaccino’s influential position and his friendship with Nicola Acciaiuoli, a leading Neapolitan politician. Boccaccio took part in the courtly life of the young nobility, between parties at court and holidays at the resorts in the Gulf of Naples, and here experienced the first pulsations of love, fruit of his rapture for the woman that he celebrated in literary terms as Fiammetta. These were important years for his humanistic training. The charm of the culture at court, the prestige of the Neapolitan Studium and Roberto d’Angiò’s rich library were irresistible stimuli for the self-taught youth, who devoured books of every type. On the one hand he was attracted to the troubadours of the oral tradition and the romans (Chrétien de Troyes, Roman de Troie, Roman de Thèbes), the perpetrators of that courtly tradition so favoured at the Angevin court; yet he was equally attracted to the Latin classics (Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Stazio, Apuleius) and the  medieval authors of Latin tradition (Bernardo Silvestre, Alano di Lilla, Guido delle Colonne) along with a growing interest for vernacular literature, from Dante to Guido Cavalcanti and Petrarch. Also Greek and Byzantine literature intrigued Giovanni, who studied Greek with Barlaam, the monk from Calabria he probably met through the erudite librarian Paolo da Perugia.

This period was the first in which Boccaccio tried his hand at writing (Elegy to Constance, Mythological Allegory, Dictamina), included in the Zibaldone Laurenziano, and the so called youthful works, including the first Rhymes, the Diana’s Hunt, the Filocolo, the Filostrato and the Teseida.