The Merchant of Prato

This extraordinary re-creation of the life of the 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 some 150,000 letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, The Merchant of Prato reveals 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 unequaled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany--