The Passionate Collector: Willard Fiske and his Libraries

Giovanni Boccaccio. Vita di Dante. Florence: B. Sermartelli, 1576.

This first Florentine edition of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante is bound together with the first printing of Dante’s own Vita nuova, also printed by the same press in 1576. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), best known as the author of the greatly influential (and often racy) Decameron, flourished a generation after the death of Dante and was a friend of Petrarch, whom he considered his mentor. The Vita di Dante is a somewhat apocryphal, although clearly reverential, biographical narrative.


		Dante Alighieri *Giovanni Boccaccio. Vita di Dante. Florence: B. Sermartelli, 1576.* This first Florentine edition of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante is bound together with the first printing of Dante’s own Vita nuova, also printed by the same press in 1576. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), best known as the author of the greatly influential (and often racy) Decameron, flourished a generation after the death of Dante and was a friend of Petrarch, whom he considered his mentor. The Vita di Dante is a somewhat apocryphal, although clearly reverential, biographical narrative. Continue the tour

Dante Alighieri