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  • Published: 17 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241293928
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

The Merchant of Prato

Francesco Di Marco Datini: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City




Iris Origo's most famous book, her classic study of the life and times of a medieval Italian merchant

In 1870 an astonishing cache, containing some 150,000 letters and great numbers of business documents, came to light. Iris Origo drew on this material to paint, in detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance. Francesco di Marco Datini, the 14th-century Tuscan merchant who forms the central subject of Iris Origo's study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages. The book is rightly celebrated as one of the most engrossing of all modern books on Italian life and history.

  • Published: 17 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241293928
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

Praise for The Merchant of Prato

Francesco di Marco Datini, the fourteenth-century Tuscan merchant who forms the subject of Origo's brilliant study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figures of the later Middle Ages ... paints, in brilliant and intricate detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance

The Times

As a picture of the daily round in Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron

Sunday Times