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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 proposed 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 discount 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 point in his life; for it was there that, as we
gather from the Filocopo, he first saw the blonde beauty, Maria, natural
daughter of King Robert, whom he has immortalized as Fiammetta. The place was
the church of San Lorenzo, the day the 26th of March, 1334. Boccaccio's
admiring gaze was observed by the lady, who, though married, proved no Laura,
and forthwith returned his love in equal measure. Their liaison lasted several
years, during which Boccaccio recorded the various phases of their passion
with exemplary assiduity in verse and prose. Besides paying her due and
discreet homage in sonnet and canzone, he associated her in one way or another,
not only with the Filocopo (his prose romance of Florio and Biancofiore, which
he professes to have written to pleasure her), but with the Ameto, the Amorosa
Visione, the Teseide, and the Filostrato; and in L'Amorosa Fiammetta he wove
out of their relations a romance in which her lover, who is there called
Pamfilo, plays Aeneas to her Dido, though with somewhat less tragic
consequences. The Proem to the Decameron shews us the after-glow of his
passion; the lady herself appears as one of the "honourable company," and
her portrait, as in the act of receiving the laurel wreath at the close of
the Fourth Day, is a masterpiece of tender and delicate delineation.

Boccaccio appears to have been recalled to Florence by his father in 1341;
and it was probably in that year that he wrote L'Amorosa Fiammetta and the
allegorical prose pastoral (with songs interspersed) which he entitled
Ameto, and in which Fiammetta masquerades in green as one of the nymphs.
The Amorosa Visione, written about the same time, is not only an allegory but
an acrostic, the initial letters of its fifteen hundred triplets composing two
sonnets and a ballade in honour of Fiammetta, whom he here for once ventures
to call by her true name. Later came the Teseide, or romance of Palamon and
Arcite, the first extant rendering of the story, in twelve books, and the

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