The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City

Description

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.

Iris Origo, the Marchesa Origo (1902-1988) was an American writer who lived in Southern Tuscany. Her other books include War in the Val d'Orcia, Leopardi and The Last Attachment.

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 *