They become the storytellers of the Decameron. Wikimedia Commonsīoccaccio’s unfavourable account, lamenting moral degradation and the enormous human suffering, is interrupted by a ray of light in the form of seven young noblewomen and three young gentlemen who appear in the Church of Santa Maria Novella on a Tuesday morning. Manuscript from the Decameron illustrated by Taddeo Crivelli. But they wandered wherever they wished, carrying bunches of fragrant flowers, herbs, or spices, or wearing them across their noses in a bid to repel the infection and the offensive odour of death. Others still consumed only what their bodies needed and excluded contact with the infected. …satisfying their every yearning, laughing and mocking at every mournful accident and so they vowed to spend day and night, for they would go to one tavern, then to another, living without any rule or measure… While some took conservative measures – self-isolating indoors in small numbers, eating and drinking moderately and shutting out contact from the outside – others, he writes, roamed freely, gratifying their senses and meeting their desires for food, fun and sex: Guide to the Classics: how Marcus Aurelius' Meditations can help us in a time of pandemic In some cases, he writes, parents even deserted their children. Produzioni Europee Associate (PEA), Les Productions Artistes Associés, Artemis Filmīoccaccio, in the same introduction, takes aim at those who fled the sick to protect their own health and in doing so degraded the social fabric.Įxtreme interpretations of social distancing led to people shunning neighbours and members of their extended and immediate families.

Boccaccio attributes the cause of this terrible plague to either malignant celestial influences or divine punishment for the iniquity of Florentine society.Ī scene from Pasolini’s 1971 film The Decameron. The Decameron is a tale of renewal and recreation in defiance of a decimating pandemic. Guide to the Classics: Albert Camus' The Plague Derived from Greek, the word decameron means ten days and is an allusion to Saint Ambrose’s Hexameron, a poetic account of the creation story, Genesis, told over six days. Each of the book’s ten storytellers tells a story a day for ten days. He vividly describes physical, social and psychological sufferings, writing of people dying in the street, rotting corpses, plague boils, swollen glands known as “buboes” – some the size of eggs, others as large as apples – bruises and the blackening skin that foreshadowed death.īoccaccio’s introduction is followed by ten sections containing short stories. In the introduction to his book, Boccaccio estimates that more than 100,000 people - over half of the city’s inhabitants - died within the walls of Florence between March 1348 and the following July.

Decameron by boccaccio