Giovanni Boccaccio

Boccaccio was raised partly in Naples, trained unhappily for banking and canon law before turning to poetry and prose under the influence of the city's vibrant courtly culture, and returned to plague-stricken Florence in his mid-thirties, having lived through the Black Death of 1348 that killed a large share of the city's population.

The Decameron, written in the plague's immediate aftermath, frames a hundred stories (of love, trickery, lust, and cunning) as tales told by ten young Florentines who've fled the dying city for a country villa. Its vernacular Italian prose and frank, often ribald realism made it a direct model for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales a generation later.

Later in life, under the influence of a stern friar's deathbed warning, he grew ashamed of the book's earthiness and urged friends to burn their copies; they didn't, and it survived to become one of the founding texts of European prose fiction.