Antonio Pucci

Antonio Pucci (c. 1310–1388) was a Florentine bellfounder, town crier, self-taught as a versifier, who wrote his collection, Libro di varie storie ("Book of Various Tales"), using a popular dialect for a popular audience. In his Centiloquio he set out in ninety-one cantos' worth of chronicle from Giovanni Villani's Cronaca. In Le proprietà di Mercato Vecchio he praised, again in terzinas, the incomparable street life of Florence's crowded market piazza. In poems he could blame or praise women with equal force, a favorite medieval trope. He composed cantari in the eight-line stanzas called ottava rima, telling the subjects of courtly romance in a fast-paced narrative, with an undertone of subversive populist skepticism that undercut the very conventions that the stories embraced, full of vivid contemporary color and pious sentiment, and perhaps he declaimed them in the public squares: La Reina d'Oriente, Gismirante, Apollonio di Tiro, Brito di Brettagna, Madonna Lionessa.

During the second half of the 14th century, Florence remained a centre of culture, but its literature developed a more popular character. The best-known representative of this development was town crier Antonio Pucci, whose vast verse production includes poems on local Florentine lore as well as historical and legendary verse narratives. The poetic transcription was called Centiloquio.