Decamerone

The Decameron opens in 1348, as the Black Death tears through Florence. Ten young Florentines — seven women and three men — flee the dying city for a villa in the nearby countryside of Fiesole, where they agree to pass the following two weeks telling stories to distract themselves from the plague they have escaped. Each day one member of the group is named king or queen and sets a theme for that day's ten tales, and the group works through a hundred stories across ten days of storytelling, with breaks set aside for chores and religious observance.

The individual tales, drawn from a wide range of sources and settings, cover love affairs, clever tricks, reversals of fortune, and the failings of clergy, merchants, and nobility alike, moving between comedy, tragedy, and bawdy farce from one story to the next. Many of the stories treat sex and desire frankly and with humor, and the collection's satire of corrupt or hypocritical clergy was controversial in its own time.

Written in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, Boccaccio's prose helped establish Italian as a serious literary language and set patterns — the frame narrative, the linked short-story cycle — that influenced writers from Chaucer onward. Beneath its variety, the collection returns repeatedly to a single idea: that human wit and resilience can answer even the plague-scale collapse of order its frame story describes.