Boccaccio at Palazzo Vecchio

An interesting exhibition at Palazzo Vecchio (Nov. 6, 2025-Jan. 6, 2026) is dedicated to Giovanni Boccaccio, best known in the world for his Decameron, a masterpiece of 14th-century Italian literature, as part of the 650th anniversary celebrations of his death.

In the very palace that has been the seat of the city government for eight centuries, the exhibition “Boccaccio politician for the city of Florence” aimed at retracing the milestones of his political career can be visited. Boccaccio, in fact, flanked his literary one with an intense political activity, holding important positions within the Florentine Republic, also participating in decisive diplomatic missions in Italy and abroad; after all, in the Middle Ages literary education, also based on knowledge of Latin rhetoric, had a key role in defining civic values.

The exhibition - which includes rare documents, missives, literary works, as well as some portraits of Boccaccio - was significantly set up in that room of the Palazzo Vecchio where the famous fourteenth-century pictorial cycle, unfortunately lost, of Illustrious Men was located: heroes of the Roman Republic, monarchs, poets and men of letters... Among the latter, alongside Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio himself figured.

The author of the Decameron died in 1375 in Certaldo (where he is buried) a medieval village not far from Florence, where it is also possible to visit Boccaccio's House-Museum, an institution that is particularly active during this year's Celebrations.