Giovanni Boccaccio

Born in Certaldo on 16 June 1313, Giovanni Boccaccio became known simply as "the Certaldese" once his name carried weight across fourteenth-century Europe. He wrote mostly in Tuscan vernacular, breaking from the formulaic dialogue of medieval convention with something closer to how people actually spoke. The Decameron, his collection of short stories, hit hard enough that Pietro Bembo held it up as the model for Italian prose in the 1500s, and its reach stretched to Chaucer in England and later to Cervantes and Lope de Vega in Spain. A correspondent of Petrarch and one of the "Three Crowns" of Italian literature alongside Dante and Petrarch, he helped lay the groundwork for humanism in Florence and spent years copying codices of the Divine Comedy, pushing Dante's reputation forward. He died 21 December 1375, leaving a body of work that some scholars call the greatest European prose of its century.