Casa Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in or near Certaldo in 1313 and returned here in his later years, living until his death in 1375 in the house that now bears his name. The medieval building was largely destroyed in World War II and rebuilt in the 1960s based on what was known of the original, which means the structure you see is a reconstruction rather than the genuine article. What matters more is what it contains: the house is now the seat of the National Boccaccio Study Centre, which holds a substantial research library and a collection of more than 500 works by contemporary artists commissioned in Boccaccio's honour.

The Decameron — 100 tales told over 10 days by 10 characters — is one of the founding texts of European prose literature, and its influence on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and nearly every writer of comic fiction since is hard to overstate. The museum does a decent job of contextualising Boccaccio's work and life without turning it into a dry academic exercise. If you have read the Decameron, or plan to, visiting the house gives the book a physical grounding that enriches it.

things to do sight museum
A story
Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the years following the Black Death of 1348, which killed perhaps half of Florence's population in a matter of months. The book's frame — ten young Florentines retreating to a country villa to tell stories while plague rages in the city — was not a literary conceit but a lived experience. Boccaccio had watched the epidemic firsthand and knew that laughter and storytelling were what people actually reached for in the face of catastrophe.