Excerpt from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio Giovanni boccaccio was born. If not at Paris, on a little family estate. By the market town of Certaldo. Nineteen miles from Florence. In the year 1313. He was the last born of the three Patriarchs of Modern Literature, having been nine years younger than Petrarch, and forty-eight years younger than Dante. Who died in 1321, when Boccaccio was a child eight years old. Boccaccio's father was a prosperous Florentine merchant, his mother a Parisian lady, and he was their illegitimate son, of whom his father took due care. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.