It was a city every bit as vicious as ancient Rome, as lofty as Athens, as uninhibited as Sodom and Gomorrah. Poets, soldiers, artists, popes, courtesans - all played their part in Florence's towering tragi-comedy.This drama was reflected and depicted by three men of genius: Dante, politician and poet; Giotto, artist, architect and wit; and Boccaccio, adventurer and writer. Dante held high office at the time when Florence's affairs - bitterly chronicled in his Divine Comedy - were at their bloodiest and most violent, and tried, unavailingly and tragically, to divert the city's disaster course. Giotto, whose concerns were paint and stone rather than politics, never suffered from Florentine savagery - his life and work reflect rather the city's liberality, magnificence, comedy; its lavish way of life and its passionate love of art. But it is left to Boccaccio, youngest of the trio, standing on the threshold of the Renaissance, to reveal in The Decameron Florence's rampant sensuality, from the elegant and luxurious to the outrageously bawdy.Drawing on contemporary anecdotes, and later Italian writers, Timothy Holme has written an absorbing account of the men and women of medieval Florence, and in particular of the three giants, Dante, Giotto and Boccaccio. Very different in temperament, their fortunes were closely entwined; Dante wrote of Giotto; Boccaccio hero-worshipped Dante; Giotto painted Dante; Boccaccio portrayed Giotto in his Decameron. And all three were involved in that extraordinary, turbulent city - the Florence of the Middle Ages.