Fourteenth century Florence was the city of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Cimabue and Giotto. In music, as well, a vibrant national school was emerging alongside those in literature and art. The first generation of these Italian musicians, however, did not all hail from Florence; two of the first generation came from Bologna (Jacopo da Bologna) and the north (Maestro Piero), and the first stirrings of their art seem to have been codified in Padua, Verona, and Milan. A third member of the generation, though he worked with them in the north, was known by his hometown: Maestro Giovanni da Firenze. He is also commonly known as Giovanni da Cascia, which may narrow his birthplace even further to the village of Cascia, not far from Florence. With Jacopo and Piero, Giovanni da Cascia helped solidify the first written-down native Italian music, both madrigals (different from the sixteenth century genre) and Cacce ("catches," or canonic pieces). Giovanni is even credited with doing the most to distinguish these nascent genres, both one from each other and from the vernacular unwritten traditions that went before. Unfortunately, documentation of specifics in Giovanni da Cascia's life are fairly scant. He lived and worked in Padua, then Verona and Milan, probably in the 1330s and 1340s. Two later Giovannis found in Florence itself may or may not be this musician: one is a cutler who belonged to one of Florence's powerful singing confraternities, one a priest "of the organs" who worked in Santa Trinitá in Florence in 1360. Neither reference is particularly helpful. Giovanni's music does survive, however, in major sources from both Florence and the north (including the earliest source of Italian music from Padua); one large Florentine manuscript contains his portrait. In addition, literary evidence for Giovanni's fame abounds: chroniclers Villani and Franco Sacchetti both mention him, and Prudenzani proves his music was still in circulation some 70 years after his death. Villani even provides one intriguing anecdote about his life. Apparently when Jacopo da Bologna, Maestro Piero, and Giovanni da Cascia were all working together for the della Scala court in Verona, the trio competed in a mini-cycle of madrigals that refes to a mysterious and praiseworthy "Anna"; she later becomes a viperous menace to her admirers, but she gets the last word in Giovanni's final contribution to the madrigal group.