Boccaccio enquanto Humanista

One of the first to fall under the influence of Petrarch's humanism was his younger contemporary Boccaccio (1313 - 75). Under the patronage of its ruler, Robert of Anjou (1309 - 43), Naples had emerged as an important intellectual centre quite early in the century and it was here that Boccacio spent his youth. His early works, written in italian, belong to the medieval tradition of rhetoric and romance; it was largely his admiration for Petrarch, whom in 1350 he got to know personally, which made him turn from vernacular to Latin, from literature to scholarship. As a scholar he fell far behind from Petrarch; he lacked the patience even to be good at copying manuscripts. He was in the main a gatherer of facts about ancient life and literature, and his encyclopedic treatises on ancient biography, geography and mythology, enjoyed a considerable vogue in the Renaissance and did much to promote the understanding of classical literature. He had a passionate interest in poetry, and this led him along the lesser known paths of Latin literature to poetry unknown to Petrarch, to Martial and Ausonius, to Ovid's Ibis and the Appendix Vergiliana; our oldest manuscript of the Priapea (Laur. 33.31) is in his hand.
[...] Although he was not in the front rank as a scholar, Boccaccio did put his genius and enthusiasm behind the humanist movement and helped to mark out the lines along which it was to develop. He naturalized humanism in Florence and made the first atempt, even if for the time an abortive one, to establish Greek studies in the city which was to become the centre of the teaching of Greek in the west.

L.D. Reynolds e N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, Oxford University Press, 1968