Born in Florence[1] or in Ragusa[2] (modern Dubrovnik), he was the son of Benci di Uguccione, surnamed "Buono", a Florentine merchant of the noble and ancient family of the Sacchetti.

Sacchetti does not aim at tragedy or complication of plot or subtle delineation of character, but simply at bringing the comic or curious event briskly to life, drawing largely on the oral tradition and on direct observation for his material.

His first work is an encomiastic poem in ottava rima, La battaglia delle belle donne di Firenze con le vecchie (1354).

This mixes popular and literary features; its metre is that of the marketplace improvisers, but the models are Boccaccio's early Caccia di Diana, which paid homage to the belles of the Neapolitan court, and Dante's (lost) sirventes on the sixty most beautiful ladies in Florence mentioned in the Vita Nova (6).

His narrative abilities are already evident in the Sposizioni di Vangeli (c. 1381), a lay equivalent of the kind of sermon-writing practised by contemporary preachers.

Its forty-nine chapters are each divided into three parts: the quaestio, proposing the theme to be treated, the exemplum developing the narrative proper, and the absolutio which states the moral to be drawn.

The title presupposes the inevitable comparison with the 100 stories of the Decameron, with which it does not aim to compete stylistically, but which it assumes can be supplemented and updated in terms of narrative material.