Merchant Of Prato

ISBN: 9780241293928

Jonathan Cape | 1960

Hardcover| 400 pages

This extraordinary re‑creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is among the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century. Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini’s death, Iris Origo reveals a shrewd, enterprising, and anxious man as he conducts business, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife, and broods on his legacy. It provides an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth‑century Tuscany. Francesco di Marco Datini has become one of the most intimately accessible figures of the later Middle Ages, and Origo’s vivid narrative brings both him and his world vividly to life.