700th Birthday of Giovanni Boccaccio

Three-quarter profile portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio, facing right, after the fresco by Andrea del Castagno of around 1450 (Florence, Uffizi Gallery). Arcing below, "BOCCACCIO 1313 2013"; to the right, the overlapping letters R (Rome Mint), RI (Italian Republic) and m (engraver Mauri's monogram).

Giovanni Boccaccio is one of the most formative authors in European literary history. With the Decameron, written around 1353, the writer, who grew up in Certaldo near Florence, created one of the most influential works of prose in the Middle Ages: a hundred novellas told by ten young people who have fled Florence during the plague of 1348. The work influenced generations of later authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare and is regarded as the founding text of European short-story writing. Boccaccio, born in 1313, probably in Tuscany, was also a humanist and scholar, a close friend of Petrarch, and one of the first to systematically study and popularise Dante Alighieri. His life's work links medieval narrative tradition with a new, worldly image of humanity that paved the way for the Renaissance.

In Italy, Boccaccio's legacy is firmly tied to Tuscany and especially to Florence, where he spent a considerable part of his life and career. The fresco by Andrea del Castagno depicting him was created around a century after his death in 1375, showing how quickly he was admitted into the canon of the great Florentines. Besides his literary works, Boccaccio left an extensive body of scholarly writing in Latin, including mythological encyclopaedias and collections of biographies significant for humanist thought in the 15th and 16th centuries. Italy honoured the 700th anniversary of Giovanni Boccaccio's birth in 2013 with a 2-euro commemorative coin.