Boccaccio by Marco Santagata

Boccaccio: A Biography

By Marco Santagata

Translated by Emlyn Eisenach

University of Chicago Press 2025

Italian literature professor Marco Santagata died in 2020 of COVID-19, and now, thanks to the University of Chicago Press, his final work, 2019’s Boccaccio: Fragilità de un genio, appears in an English-language translation by Emlyn Eisenach. It’s the first full-dress general-audience life of the Decameron author to appear in English in decades, and despite its odd, humdrum dress (who is that slim, bug-eyed man on the US dust jacket? Surely not the famously rotund Boccaccio – maybe his inner vision of himself?), it’s a tremendously detailed and readable work, very likely the best biography this writer has had since the one John Addington Symonds wrote back in 1895.

Eisenach’s translation of the book’s title is simply “Boccaccio: A Biography,” but Santagata’s original title speaks to a character-thread running through his portrait of the artist, a hyper-sensitive touchiness on display even with intimates. “One day, a friend accused him of being a ‘man of glass,’ that is, fragile, capricious, unable to tolerate inconveniences, and quick to be offended by trifles,” Santagata relates. “True to character, Boccaccio responded with a letter meticulously refuting the accusation.”

This intensely personal element of the book is its most enjoyable recurrent note, threading through Santagata’s discussion of all the works this prolific author wrote that aren’t the famous and often-translated Decameron. At every point, through all the tensions and disappointments of Boccaccio’s life (and all of its joys as well, including his famous friendship with Petrarch, visiting the poet in Parma in 1351 so they can both take a stroll and look at the restored gravestone of Livy), Santagata remembers the whinging, self-pitying man behind the literary façade and is often at his best when musing on the connections between the two: “Rather than lazy,” he writes at one such point of many, “Boccaccio] appears to have been insecure, a man for whom the imaginary world of literature, parallel but connected with the real one, offered not only a means to make a name for himself, but also a way, through fantasy, to fulfill his deepest wishes and soothe unhealed wounds.”

And since the bulk of Santagata’s scholarly energy had been devoted to the other two members of the great trinity of Italian literature, Dante and Petrarch, comparisons naturally crop up regularly in this life of their less exalted brother. When comparing Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Boccaccio’s Decameron, for instance, Santagata is mindful of the fact that neither man had any real conception of how honored they would be by posterity:

The works resulted from two complementary yet opposite processes: Petrarch sought to bring a reformed vernacular poetry into the domain of classical humanism; Boccaccio sought to add a dose of refined ingredients to the recipe for less-exalted vernacular literature. Both would win followers, but the truly innovative core of their work would only be realized much later.

The book is full of confident asides of this kind that make it such an easy pleasure to read. And it saves the best for last: the nearly 300 pages of End Notes are a veritable feast of erudition and insight, more than doubling the value of an already-wonderful work.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News