Giovanni Boccaccio Quotes
While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated by G. H. McWilliam, 2nd ed., Penguin Books, 1995, p. 220.
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. He was known par excellence as the Certaldese, and one of the most important figures in the European literary panorama of the fourteenth century. Some scholars (including Vittore Branca) define him as the greatest European prose writer of his time, a versatile writer who amalgamated different literary trends and genres, making them converge in original works, thanks to a creative activity exercised under the banner of experimentalism.