[20] See F. Villani, Le Vite d' uomini illustri Fiorentini (Firenze, 1826). F. Villani was a contemporary of Boccaccio, and succeeded him in the chair founded at Florence for the exposition of the Divine Comedy.
[21] See Galletti, Philippi Villani: Liber de Civitatis Florentiæ famosis civibus ex codice Mediceo Laurentiano, nunc primum editus, etc. (Firenze, 1847), and on this Calò, Filippo Villani e il Liber de Origine civitatis, etc. (Rocca S. Casciano, 1904), pp. 154-5.
[22] The son of his "natural father" may mean that Boccaccio di Chellino was not his adoptive father, or it may mean that Giovanni was a bastard. See on this Crescini, op. cit., p. 38 et seq., and Della Torre, La Giovinezza di Gio. Boccaccio (Città di Castello, 1905), cap. i.
[23] Domenico Bandini Aretino says: "Boccatius pater ejus ... amavit quamdam iuventulam Parisinam, quam prout diligentes Ioannem dicunt quamquam alia communior sit opinio sibi postea uxorem fecit, ex qua genitus est Ioannes." See Solerti, Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio scritte fino al secolo XVII (Milano, 1904). The lives of Boccaccio constitute the third part of the volume; the second of these is Domenico's. Cf. Messera, Le più antiche biografie del Boccaccio in Zeitschrift für Rom. Phil. (1903), XXVII, fasc. iii. See also Crescini, op. cit., p. 16, note 1, and Antona Traversi, op. cit. in Fansulia della Domencia, II, 23, where many authors of this opinion are quoted.
[24] Giovanni Acquettino da Prato was a bad poet. His sonnet says: "Nacqui in Firenze al Pozzo Toscanelli." Pozzo Toscanelli was in the S. Felicità quarter, close to the Via Guicciardini.
[25] St. della Lett. Ital. (1823), V, part iii. p. 738 et seq.
[26] Op. cit., pp. 277-80.
[27] Corazzini, Lettere edite e inedite di G. Boccaccio (Firenze, 1877), p. viii. et seq.
[28] Koerting, Boccaccio's Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1880), p. 67 et seq., and Boccaccio Analekten in Zeitschrift für Rom. Phil. (1881), v. p. 209 et seq. If Antona Traversi has disposed of Corazzini's assertions, Crescini seems certainly to have demolished the arguments of Koerting.
[29] All the dates and facts so carefully established by Crescini and Della Torre are really dependent on the date of Boccaccio's birth, 1313, being the true one. This is the corner-stone of their structure. But the story of his illegitimacy and foreign birth was current long before this date was established. It was the commonly received opinion. Why? Doubtless because Boccaccio himself had practically stated so in the Filocolo and the Ameto. That Filippo Villani's Italian translator was dependent on these allegories for his story seems to be proved (cf. Della Torre, op. cit., p. 30); so probably was the general public. The question remains: Was Boccaccio speaking the mere truth concerning himself in these allegories? Filippo Villani himself, as we have seen, believed that he was born at Certaldo; so did Domenico Aretino. For myself, I do not think that enough has been allowed for the indirect influence of Fiammetta in the Filocolo and the Ameto. They were written for her—to express his love for her. She was the illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Naples by the wife of the nobleman Conte d'Aquino—a woman of French extraction. It is strange, then, that Boccaccio's story of his birth in the allegories should so closely resemble hers. She doubtless thought herself a very great lady, and was probably prouder of her royal blood than a legitimate princess would have been. But Boccaccio was just the son of a small Florentine trader; and he was a Poet. To proclaim himself—half secretly—illegitimate was a gain to him, a gain in romance. How could a youthful poet, in love with a princess too, announce himself as the son of a petty trader, a mere ordinary bourgeois, to a lady so fine as the blonde Fiammetta? Of course he could not absolutely deny that this was so, especially after his father's visit (1327), and also we must remember that the Florentine trader held, or is supposed to have held, quite a good social position even in feudal Naples. Nevertheless his bourgeois birth did not please the greatest story-teller of Europe. So he invented a romantic birth—he too would be the result of a love-intrigue, even as Fiammetta was. And because he loved her, and therefore wished to be as close to her and as like her as possible, he too would have a French mother. Suppose all this to be true, and that after all Boccaccio is the son of Margherita, the wife of his father; that he was born in wedlock in 1318; that he met Fiammetta not on March 30, 1331 (see [Appendix I]), but on March 30, 1336, and that he told Petrarch he was born in 1313 because he knew his father was in Paris at that date—this last with his usual realism to clinch the whole story he had told Fiammetta.