In the summer of 1348, the Black Death sweeps through Florence with terrifying speed, turning the thriving city into a charnel house. Ten young nobles, seven women and three men, flee the dying city for a secluded villa in the hills, where they resolve to wait out the catastrophe by filling their days with story. Each morning they elect a king or queen to set the theme; each evening, each person tells a tale. Over ten days, one hundred stories emerge: tales of lovers thwarted and reunited, of cunning servants outwitting masters, of priests and merchants and kings revealing their moral natures in unexpected ways. Boccaccio constructs a masterwork of nested narratives, where the frame story of the plague refugees grounds the wild proliferations of tale within tale. The tone shifts constantly, from grim realism to bawdy comedy, from romantic idealism to cynical satire, yet the organizing intelligence holds it all together. What emerges is nothing less than a portrait of humanity itself: greedy, lascivious, heroic, clever, and endlessly resourceful. The Decameron invented the modern short story and established storytelling as both entertainment and survival strategy. It remains essential for anyone who believes that narrative is how we make sense of catastrophe, and how we remember what it meant to be alive when everything was ending.
