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“... the victims’ armpits or groins, and then black bruising spread across their bodies. According to Giovanni Boccaccio, whose father and stepmother died during the outbreak, the disease was so infectious that pigs who nuzzled the discarded clothing of the dead began instantly to writhe in agony, and then dropped down dead. The healthy fled the sick, and ...”

“... about monks) and the man responsible for the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura; Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75); Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), author of the risqué Sonetti Lussuriosi; Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose Prince outlines an instrumental conception of religion as a useful theatre for the new ruler that chimed with a sense of De ...”

“... At a time when Latin was still Europe’s central literary language, he was – as one friend, Giovanni della Casa, recalled after his death – the first to show how to imitate the classics in an artistic and individual way. During his time as a papal secretary, he saved the cultural credit of the papacy itself, by drafting bulls and letters on Christian ...”

“... and, at the fontwhere I was baptised, take the laurel crown.It wasn’t to be. Dante’s friend Giovanni del Virgilio promised to secure him the laureate’s crown in Bologna if he produced a poem worthy of it, perhaps a military epic in Latin. Dante declined, just as he had declined the humiliating terms on which the Florentines offered to revoke his ...”

“... There was a brief period when all three were alive: Dante died in 1321, when Petrarch was 17 and Boccaccio eight; the younger writers worked in his shadow. They were all Florentine, and in the phrase’s first coinage they were the ‘three crowns of Florence’. This was both a statement of civic pride (conveniently forgetting that both Dante and Petrarch ...”

“... and promptly dies. This is a scene from ‘Jeli the Shepherd’, a story by the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), who is not read much in English, and often only dutifully in Italy, where he has the cloudy venerability of the canonical. In English, he is known, perhaps, for ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, a tale which became a play and then an ...”

“... inflicting itself on the bodies and minds of those obsessed with its renewal. Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio, referring to Cicero as a mutual friend: ‘You are right: those with whom we live on the most intimate terms are the ones who most often wound us.’ A small book made for a different kind of intimacy: more leisurely, less wounding. Margolis cites ...”

“... served the country well enough for centuries, a sort of distillation of the Florentine of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, but it wasn’t an idiom for modern times – not the sort of thing you could put in people’s mouths in a novel. And it had suddenly become very important that Italian writers produce novels.‘High literature is for the few,’ the poet ...”

“... these rimesters. Another man whose handwriting is found in these pages is the engaging Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, generally known under the imposing alias of ‘Zoroastro’, though also answering to other nicknames such as ‘Indovino’ (Fortune-Teller) and ‘Gallozzolo’ (Gall-Nut). A humble gardener’s son from a village near Florence, Tommaso gained ...”

“... where the Wise Men pay him a proper degree of attention. There is, for instance, an Adoration by Giovanni di Paolo in the Lynskey Collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in which one of the Wise Men has his arm round Joseph’s shoulder, and is also holding his hand, perhaps saying: ‘Well I know what it’s like to be woken up in the middle of ...”

“... are ‘themselves closely related’ to a tradition ‘starting forward from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’. The trouble is, of course, that we know very little about what Michelangelo read: Summers is painfully aware of this. It is also hard to be sure of what he said. Condivi’s biography is a valuable source and clearly reflects Michelangelo’s own ...”

“... biography: Dante’s self-image, the way it dominated his writings and conditioned his every move. Giovanni Villani, almost the only person to write about Dante who actually knew him, thought him a ‘great poet and philosopher’ but ‘presumptuous, contemptuous and disdainful’ as a person. A generation later, ...”