We have very limited information about Giovanni Boccaccio’s public life in the period between his return to Florence and 1350. Boccaccio tried to get involved in Florentine politics, but with little success. His official tasks seem to have been limited to a few missions to the courts in Romagna. In 1345-46 Boccaccio was in Ravenna, to see Ostasio da Polenta, whilst in 1347 he was certainly in Forlì, to see Francesco Ordelaffi. He had indeed not lost all hope of returning to Naples and the elegant Angevin court, even though the death of King Robert, in 1343, and the echoes of civil disorder that followed made him realise this was highly unlikely. 

His reduced participation in civil life can thus be linked to various factors. On the one hand his family’s financial and social condition bore considerable weight, tied as it was to his reintroduction into a political context that was profoundly different to the Neapolitan one and which his many years abroad had made him a stranger to; on the other, Boccaccio continued to dream about Naples and seemed rather more interested in building presuppositions for his return instead of earning himself an influential position in Florence. Lastly, we should not forget that his considerable increment in literary productivity may have contributed to keeping Boccaccio far from the political scene. His decade in Florence was marked by a conspicuous commitment in creative writing that produced the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, the Amorosa visione, the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, the Ninfale fiesolano, the first bucolic Carmina, the De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi and the albeit doubtful translation into the vernacular of the Fourth Decade by Livy.