Boccaccio writes the Decameron

Boccaccio, the son of a Florentine merchant, had spent his youth in Naples and returned to Florence in 1341. In 1345–1347 he sought patronage at the courts of Ravenna and Forlì; according to Natalino Sapegno’s entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani he was back in Florence in 1348, the year of the plague, though some accounts consider his presence there uncertain. His stepmother died in the epidemic, and his father, who had been in charge of the city’s supplies, died in 1349. The book is usually dated to about 1349–1353, which the same dictionary considers the most reliable dating; some scholars propose 1348–1351, others 1352–1354, and some of the tales probably circulated earlier — in the introduction to the fourth day the author already answers critics of the first three. Boccaccio went on revising the text; his autograph of about 1370 survives in Berlin.

The frame story begins with a description of the plague in Florence. Seven young women and three young men, who meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella, retire to a villa in the hills near Fiesole for two weeks; each day one of them, as king or queen, sets a theme, and by the end they have told a hundred stories of fortune and wit, of tragic and happy love, of tricks played by women on men and by people on one another, of the lust and greed of the clergy and the adventures of travelling merchants. Boccaccio borrowed many of his plots from older French, Italian and Latin sources, but set them in contemporary life and gave his characters lively dialogue.

The Church condemned the book: it was burned in Savonarola’s bonfire in Florence in 1497, placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559 and reissued in expurgated editions in 1573 and 1582. Yet it was widely copied and printed, became a model of Italian prose and influenced Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; it is sometimes called the “Human Comedy”, in contrast to Dante’s “Divine” one, a name Boccaccio himself had given.