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Never having found the patron *#tlzqm10 he sought, Boccaccio's last years in Florence were beset by poverty. His Tuscan friends gave him employment by sending him as ambassador to Avignon and Rome. He made a meager living as nike air max ltd red and white a copyist, transcribing his own works for others. Finally, in Octo- ber 1373, the Commune of Florence engaged him for a hundred fiorins to read aloud and comment on Dante's Divine Comedy in the Church of San Stefano de Badia. He gave sixty such lecture-readings before his pains of gout and scabies and his obesity-and learned objections to his efforts to"vulgarize" Dante-put a stop to the series. The death of his mentor Petrarch in July 1374 added to his miseries, which Petrarch himself had generously tried to assuage by willing Boccaccio a valuable fur coat for cold nights in his study. Boccaccio died on December 21, 1375. In his last words in the epitaph he wrote for himself he affirmed that "he cherished the nourishing Muses." Like other classics of vernacular literature, the Decameron was jordan se 15 white on white widely read black and white jordan shoes before academic critics dignified it by their attention. It was dissemi- nated not through monastic scriptoria and university libraries but by Italian merchants who took copies with them across Europe. Not for the first or last time, authors were far ahead of scholars. Even after the book had delighted generations of readers, for centuries the translators Nike women air max 2009 white blue insisted on remaining anonymous. It was a half-millennium before a translator of the Decameron into English dared sign his name to the work. Even these anonymous early English translators proceeded with extreme caution. 6'Whenever met with any thing that seemed immodest or loose," one explained in his preface, he had studied "so to manage the Expression, and conceal the Matter, that the fair Sex may read it without blushing." Despite all these precautions, two and a half centuries passed before any apparently complete translation, perhaps by John Florio, appeared-in1620. Modern English translations still kept certain troublesome passages(like the story of the innocent Alibech) decently veiled in the original Italian. Those who tried to fumigate Boccaccio served modern readers with a short list of the most interesting stories.