GIOVANNI da PRATO. - Writer, born at Prato about 1367, died at Firenze between 1442 and 1446. His real name was G. Gherardi. Administrator of Dante’s estate, he lectured on the Commedia in S. Maria del Fiore.
Dantean reminiscences and Boccaccian modes are found in the Philomena (ed. by C. del Balzo in Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante, III, Roma 1891), a poem in terza rima in which the poet, guided by seven women (the cardinal and theological virtues), proceeds from the forest of error to the hill of theology. Naïve mysticism pervades the Trattato d'una angelica cosa mostrata per una divatissima visione (in Wesselofski, p. 885 sgg.). Under Boccaccio’s artistic influence, yet marked by a sense of noble religiosity, is his principal work, which has come down to us without a title and mutilated (the first four books are incomplete, and only the beginning of the fifth remains), and which A. Wesselofsky entitled Il Paradiso degli Alberti, after the Florentine villa of Antonio Alberti, where he, Coluccio Salutati, Luigi Marsili, and other humanists discourse on history and philosophy. The learned heaviness of the narrative is at times enlivened by the depiction of contemporary Florentine customs and by nine lively novellas.