The Merchant of Prato

Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City

Iris Origo author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:4th May '17

£10.99

Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.

The Merchant of Prato cover

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

This extraordinary re-creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is one of the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century.

Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, it reveals to us a shrewd, enterprising, anxious man, as he makes deals, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife and broods on his legacy. It is an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany.

'Datini has now probably become most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages ... brilliant and intricate' The Times

'As a picture of Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron' Sunday Times

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 *

ISBN: 9780241293928

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 22mm

Weight: 292g

400 pages