Boccaccio had completed his affectionate biography of Dante, “Trattatello in laude di Dante” (“Little Tractate in Praise of Dante,” in 1372.

The following year, by invitation of the Florentine Commune, he had delivered public readings of Dante's Divine Comedy (and is said to have met Chaucer in Florence in that year).

He dies at sixty-two on December 21, 1375, having outlived his great friend and fellow humanist Petrarch, who had died at seventy on July 19 of the previous year.