In a secluded villa outside Florence, seven women and ten men, seeking shelter from the plague, answer the call to entertain one another. The result is Boccaccio’s Decameron, one hundred tales and a masterpiece of Italian prose written in the Florentine vernacular. Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, in the middle of the fourteenth century (1348 – 1353) soon after the Black Plague swept through Italy and Europe causing untold devastation across the population. The Decameron is called a “frame story,” not unlike Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which several characters tell their tales, unified about one central theme. Boccaccio’s theme is love, and his ten characters each tell one tale per day for ten days. The stories run the gamut from comedic to erotic to tragic, and Boccaccio is unfailingly progressive in his attempts to show the life of fourteenth century Florence, as the great city stood on the cusp of the Renaissance. Though the Black Plague might knock on the door, seven women and three men delighted one another for ten days with stories set down in a structure that allowed the writer to avail himself of ten individual points of view. Each point of view, filtered through ten tales, then served the vast exposition of a hundredfold faces of the late Middle Ages, its life, its loves, its laughter and its tears.  (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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