Of those early years we have naturally very little knowledge. Before he was seven years old, as he himself tells us,[37] he was set to learn to read and write. Then he was placed in the care of Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli da Strada, father of the more famous Zanobi, to begin the study of "Grammatica."[38] With Mazzuoli he began Latin then,[39] but presently his father, who had already destined him for the counting-house, took him from the study of "Grammatica" and, as Giovanni tells us, made him give his time to "Arismetrica."[40] Then, if we may believe the _Filocolo_, he took him into his business, where he learned, no doubt, to keep books of account and saw some of the mysteries of banking and money-lending. Against this mode of life he conceived then a most lively hatred, which was to increase rather than to diminish as he grew older. Such work, he assures us in his _Commentary_ on the _Divine Comedy_, cannot be followed without sin. Great wealth, he tells us in the _Filocolo_, prohibits, or at least spoils virtue: there is nothing better or more honest than to live in a moderate poverty; while in the _De Genealogiis Deorum_ he says poverty means tranquillity of soul: for riches are the enemy of quietness and a torment of the mind.
[Illustration: CASA DI BOCCACCIO, CORBIGNANO, NEAR FLORENCE]
But we know nothing of his childhood, only it seems to have been unhappy. Till his return from Naples many year later, in spite of his hatred for business, he seems always to have got on well with his father.[41] In remembering words which he then wrote concerning him[42] we must remind ourselves that Boccaccino was at that time an old man, and had probably lost those "excellent manners" of which Villani speaks; and by then, too, Giovanni had altogether disappointed him, by forsaking first business, and later the study of Canon Law. His childhood seems to have been unhappy then not from any fault or want of care on his father's part, though no doubt his hatred of business had something to do with it; but the true cause of the unhappiness, and even, as he says, of the fear which haunted his boyhood, was almost certainly Margherita, his stepmother, with whom he doubtless managed to live well enough till her son Francesco was born.