Portrait by Andrea del Castagno of Giovanni Boccaccio, circa 1450.

Boccaccio began work on the Decameron around 1349. It is probable that the structures of many of the tales date from earlier in his career, but the choice of a hundred tales and the frame-story of the "lieta brigata" (happy band) of three men and seven women dates from this time. The work was largely complete by 1352. It was Boccaccio's final effort in literature and one of his last works in Italian. It provided a model for many later collections on which authors like Shakespeare drew for plots, characters, and realistic style. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License (Wikipedia).