CASA DI BOCCACCIO, CORBIGNANO, NEAR FLORENCE
But we know nothing of his childhood, only it seems to have been unhappy. Till his return from Naples many year later, in spite of his hatred for business, he seems always to have got on well with his father.[41] In remembering words which he then wrote concerning him[42] we must remind ourselves that Boccaccino was at that time an old man, and had probably lost those "excellent manners" of which Villani speaks; and by then, too, Giovanni had altogether disappointed him, by forsaking first business, and later the study of Canon Law. His childhood seems to have been unhappy then not from any fault or want of care on his father's part, though no doubt his hatred of business had something to do with it; but the true cause of the unhappiness, and even, as he says, of the fear which haunted his boyhood, was almost certainly Margherita, his stepmother, with whom he doubtless managed to live well enough till her son Francesco was born.
We have already relied so much on the Filocolo and the Ameto that it will only confuse us to forsake them now. In the former,[43] he tells us that one day the young shepherd, Idalagos (himself), following his father, saw two bears, who glared at him with fierce and terrible eyes in which he saw a desire for his death, so that he was afraid and fled away from the paternal fields to follow his calling in other woods. These two bears who chased Giovanni from home, not directly but indirectly, by causing the fear which hatred always rouses in the young, were, it seems, Margherita and her son Francesco, born about 1321.
It may well be that Boccaccino had come to the conclusion about this time that Giovanni would never make a banker, and hoping yet to see him prosperous in the Florentine manner, sent him to Naples to learn to be a merchant. If we add to this inference the evidence of the allegory of the two bears in the Filocolo, we may conclude that his father, disappointed with him already, was not hard to persuade when Margherita, loath to see the little bastard beside her own son Francesco, urged his departure.
All this, however, is conjecture. We know nothing of Boccaccio's early years save that his father sent him to Naples to learn business while he was still young, as is generally believed in 1330, but as we may now think, not without good reason, in 1323, when he was ten years old.[44]
[CHAPTER II]
1323-1330
HIS ARRIVAL IN NAPLES—HIS YEARS WITH THE MERCHANT—HIS ABANDONMENT OF TRADE AND ENTRY ON THE STUDY OF CANON LAW