The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio is a collection of 100 novellas written by the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio in the 14th century. The book is set during the Black Death pandemic in Florence, Italy, and follows a group of ten young people who flee to a villa outside the city to escape the disease. To pass the time, they each tell stories over the course of ten days, with a different person telling a story each day. The stories cover a wide range of topics, from love and romance to trickery and deceit, and are often ...
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The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio is a collection of 100 novellas written by the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio in the 14th century. The book is set during the Black Death pandemic in Florence, Italy, and follows a group of ten young people who flee to a villa outside the city to escape the disease. To pass the time, they each tell stories over the course of ten days, with a different person telling a story each day. The stories cover a wide range of topics, from love and romance to trickery and deceit, and are often humorous and bawdy in nature. The Decameron is considered a masterpiece of Italian literature and is renowned for its vivid portrayal of life in medieval Italy, as well as its influence on later literary works such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.Here beginneth the book called Decameron and surnamed Prince Galahalt wherein are contained a hundred stories in the ten days told by seven ladies and three young men.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
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This wonderful classic might be understood better if compared to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written around the same time period, and is also presented by its author as a collection of tales told by a string of people traveling together, in order to entertain one another and pass the time. Of course the travelers are inventions of two authors. The reason they travel is the overarching difference between these two books. But in both you find a similar lustiness, appetite, vitality and humor in the characters as they regale one another. Boccaccio's travelers, who are relocating from place to place to avoid the plague, seem determined not to sink into crudity in a sensual story, and daily keep up their spirits with refined music and poetry. Chaucer's people on the other hand are far more natural, and bodily functions are a hilarious/necessary part of some of the tales. But when you reflect that Boccaccio's people, young persons who've lost their entire families, have to face an entirely new future after the ravages of the epidemic, their emphasis on slightly artificial refinement is a rather admirable insistence on staying alive, staying whole and healthy -- while not far away, chaos has taken their city from them. Knowing that the author Boccaccio lived through the plague himself enhances my appreciation of the book. Great stories to reread. Some are slightly fable-like, and most involve love and sex. The delicate narrative linking the stories leaves you wondering exactly what the storytellers are actually doing with one another. Hmm!
