Son Ofa merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino di Buonaiuto, of Cer taldo in Val d'elsa, a little town about midway between Empoli and Siena, but within the Florentine contado, Giovanni Boccaccio was born, most probably at Paris, in the year 1313. His mother, at any rate, was a Frenchwoman, whom his father seduced during a sojourn at Paris, and afterwards deserted. SO much as this Boccaccio has himself told us, under a transparent veil of allegory, in his dmeto. Of his mother we would fain know more, for his wit has in it a quality, especially noticeable in the Tenth Novel of the Sixth Day of the Decameron, which marks him out as the forerunner of Rabelais, and prompts us to ask how much more his genius may have owed to his French ancestry. His father was Of su?icient standing in Flor ence to be chosen Prior in 1321 but this brief term of Office — but two months — was his last as well as his first experience Of public life. Of Boccaccio's early years we know nothing more than that his first preceptor was the Florentine grammarian, Giovanni da Strada, father of the poet Zanobi da Strada, and that, when he was about ten years Old, he was bound apprentice to a merchant, with whom he spent the next six years at Paris, whence he returned to Florence with an inveterate repugnance to commerce. His father then preposed to make a canonist of him but the study of Gratian proved hardly more congenial than the routine Of the counting-house to the lad, who had already evinced a taste for letters and a sojourn at Naples, where under the regime Of the enlightened King Robert there were coteries of learned men, and even Greek was not altogether unknown, decided his future career. According to Filippo Villani his choice was finally fixed by a visit to the tomb of Vergil on the Via Puteolana, and, though the modern critical Spirit is apt to dis count such stories, there can be no doubt that such a pilgrimage would be apt to make a deep, and perhaps enduring, impression upon a nature ardent and sensitive, and already conscious of extraordinary powers. His stay at Naples was also in another respect a turning.
