The Trecento (Italian for 300, short for "mille trecento," 1300) refers to the 14th century in Italian cultural history.

Commonly the Trecento is considered to be the beginning of the Renaissance in art history. Painters of the Trecento included Giotto di Bondone, as well as painters of the Sienese School, which became the most important in Italy during the century, including Duccio, Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro. Important sculptors included two pupils of Giovanni Pisano: Arnolfo di Cambio and Tino di Camaino, and Bonino da Campione.

The Trecento was also famous as a time of heightened literary activity, with writers working in the vernacular instead of Latin. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio were the leading writers of the age. Dante produced his famous La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), a summation of the medieval worldview, and Petrarch wrote verse in a lyrical style influenced by the Provençal poetry of the troubadours.

Jacopo da Bologna (fl. 1340–c. 1386) was an Italian composer of the Trecento, the period sometimes known as the Italian ars nova. He was one of the first composers of this group, making him a contemporary of Gherardello da Firenze and Giovanni da Firenze. He concentrated mainly on madrigals, including both canonic (caccia-madrigal) and non-canonic types, but also composed a single example each of a caccia, lauda-ballata, and motet (Marrocco 1954, 14–16, 27–28; Fischer and d'Agostino 2001).

His setting of Non al suo amante, written about 1350, is the only known contemporaneous setting of Petrarch's poetry (Petrobelli 1975; Fischer and d'Agostino 2001).

Jacopo's ideal was "suave dolce melodia" (sweet, clean melodies) (Fischer and d'Agostino 2001). His style is marked by fully texted voice parts that never cross. The untexted passages which connect the textual lines in many of his madrigals are also noteworthy (Cuthbert 2006, 192).

He is well-represented in the Squarcialupi Codex, the large collection of 14th century music long owned by the Medici family; twenty-nine compositions of his are found in that source, the principal source for music of the Italian ars nova, alongside music by Francesco Landini and others (Marrocco 1954, 6). A portrait of Jacopo is found in this manuscript, and another possible portrait is found in a north-Italian manuscript, Fulda, Landesbibliothek, Hs. D23, fol. 302 (Fischer 1973; Fischer and d'Agostino 2001). However, the identification of Jacopo as the subject of the painting in the latter source was made by a hand later than the manuscript copyist's, throwing some doubt on its reliability (Fischer 1973, 62).

Gherardello da Firenze (also Niccolò di Francesco or Ghirardellus de Florentia‎) (c. 1320-1325–1362 or 1363) was an Italian composer of the Trecento. He was one of the first composers of the period sometimes known as the Italian ars nova.

Gherardello was a member of a musical family, and both his brother Jacopo and his son Giovanni were also composers; however, none of their music survives. He was probably born in or near Florence, and spent most of his life there.

In 1343 he appears in the records of the cathedral of Florence, Santa Reparata (this was before the building of the main cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore) as a clerk. Later he became a priest, and then served as chaplain of Santa Reparata from 1345 until 1351 — during the years that the Black Death ravaged the city.

Probably around 1351 he joined the order of the Vallombrosa, a Benedictine order with an abbey about 30 km from Florence. Details of the last years of his life are lacking, and his death date is inferred from a sonnet written in 1362 or 1363, probably by Simone Peruzzi, mourning his death, which occurred at Florence.