The Italian trecento, or what we in English call the fourteenth century, saw a great flourishing of art, music, and literature--and unimaginable catastrophe, as the Black Plague took half the population of Europe (some have estimated that 60 per cent of Florence’s population died).
This was also the century of the poet Petrarch, of the artist Giotto, of composers such as Francesco Landini, who survived the plague, and of the writer Boccaccio (1313-1375). Boccaccio’s most famous work, the Decameron,…
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