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When did Giovanni Boccaccio first meet Petrarch?
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Giovanni Boccaccio
Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio, detail of a fresco by Andrea del Castagno; in the Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia, Florence.
Giovanni Boccaccio first met Petrarch in Florence in 1350. This encounter was a significant turning point in Boccaccio’s life, as he revered Petrarch as his master and the two went on to lay the foundations for the humanist reconquest of classical antiquity through their exchange of ideas and scholarship.1