Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

Written in the 14th Century, around forty years after Dante's Divina Commedia, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the only masterpiece I've ever read. I first read it before I wrote my first novel at twenty-three, and I remember reading it intensely to try to imitate its smooth and polished prose style. Including everything I've read since then I'd probably still call it the only true masterpiece.

In this book, a single author compiles 101 stories, that are brilliant, within frame narrative (a story within a story, within a story). Despite what a serious task and high ambition Boccaccio sets up for himself, the whole work (well aside from the opening about the plague) is so funny and moving, and yet so easy to read. But more than that, I realised, only in 2025, that it's perhaps the only narrative book of fiction that I have that shows human nature as it really is. Boccaccio doesn't show the side of human nature we might wish it were, or try to seem, he strips it bare and shows characters we all know, and stories we should expect of people, but he instead of making us despair, he makes us laugh. Just as Dante's Divina Commedia is himself looking towards God, then Boccaccio's Decameron is as if God looking towards humanity - but with popcorn.

It was Boccaccio who gave the title Divina Commedia to Dante’s metaphysical allegorical epic poem. Before then Dante’s work was simply titled Commedia, to categorise it apart from being a tragedy and because it was not written in the high style, Latin. Just as Dante’s epic is now called the Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s masterpiece is considered the Human Comedy.

The title Decameron (meaning ten days) is a reference to the Hexameron (meaning "six days" in Greek) of St Ambrose, which is a reformulation in verse of the biblical account of Genesis. The Decameron starts with Genesis in reverse, as if beginning with Judgement, of the plague. Boccaccio composed the Decameron between 1348 and 1353. Like Dante’s work, it circulated in hand-copied manuscripts, and later widely read in literary and courtly circles from the 1350s onward. The first printed edition appeared in 1470 in Naples — two years before Dante's Commedia appeared in print. during the early years of movable type in Italy. English writers were influenced by it as early as Geoffrey Chaucer for The Canterbury Tales (written between 1387-1400), and William Shakespeare for Cymbeline, All’s Well That Ends Well, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and others. However, it wasn't translated into English in full until the 19th century. Editions were always abridged due to the subject matter of sex and its satirical humour on the church, it being considered too it bawdy, raunchy, and anti-clerical.

The Divina Commedia was written around 1308 and probably completed by 1321. The premise to the Decameron is that the plague of Black Death of 1348 sweeps through Europe where it arrives to Florence. Boccaccio, at the beginning of the work, makes a long and detailed description of the disease that struck Florence in 1348. That sets up the outer frame. Within these circumstances, inside the church of Santa Maria Novella, seven women decide to temporarily leave Florence for the countryside, to leave sorrows behind and enjoy life whatever happens. As they decide, three men enter the church who agree to join them, making them now a group of ten. This sets up the second frame of the narrative. In the countryside, they decide to spend each day telling a story each of their own. This sets up the third and final frame for the Decameron proper, which is a hundred short stories over ten days. Each day one person is elected as king or queen for the day, and they get to not only decide the theme of the day's stories, but organise the food, music, and entertainment after the stories have been told. Though mathematically it amounts to one hundred stories, there is an additional story in the opening of the fourth day, so its technically one-hundred and one stories.

FRAME NARRATIVE

So the book build around a frame narrative of three layers, where first is the plague told by the author, then the author's storytellers who decide to go to the countryside, and then the characters within each of their stories they tell.

The plague starts the frame narrative well, because it sets up the idea that at this time all moral decency had gone out the window, overturning moral decorum into an anarchy of the human condition, where impulses overturn reason. As Thucydides says, "But war is a stern teacher ; in depriving them of power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people's minds down to the level of their actual circumstances" (Book 3 Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War).

The frame narrative, at first seems to derive from Arabic narratives such as The Arabian Nights (which I have in two volumes but dislike), Boccaccio incorporated tales that share themes and specific plot points with tales found in The Arabian Nights. But The Arabian Nights wasn't published as a single volume in Europe until the 18th Century in French and the first definitive version wasn't until 1835. So Bocaccio didn't read a complete translation. Another influence could be the originally Syriac Book of Seven Wise Masters. which is a frame narrative with multiple embedded stories, known across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa from the ninth century onwards. But given the spirit of looking back to Ancient Greco-Roman texts during the Renaissance, it's more likely to be works like The Golden Ass of Apuleius and Satyricon by Petronius. But also in Spain, there is Count Lucanor: Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio (1335) written by Prince Don Juan Manuel which was also a 14th century book but is actually earlier than Boccaccio's by nearly15 years, and is where the Emperor's New Clothes story comes, titled "Of That Which Happened to a King and Three Imposters". My edition of Fifty Pleasant Stories says "Tales of the Spanish Boccaccio" However, chronologically speaking, Boccaccio was the Italian Juan Manuel. So, it was the general literary idea. Chaucer obviously borrowed this frame narrative for Canterbury Tales.

The structure of the book follows the way the storytellers decide to organise their days. A king and queen will be elected for each day to choose the theme of the stories for the following day. The first day there is no given theme. Each day they each tell a story, except on Friday and Saturday, Only Dioneus, for his young age, is allowed not to respect the established theme, however after the first day he will always be the last to deliver his story to the group. In addition, the first and ninth days have a free theme for everyone.

THEMES

There are three great Italian writers of the 14^th Century. Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio. Far superior to the later 16^th century poets Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Arisoto. When Dante died, Petrarch was seventeen and Boccaccio was only eight.

There is some lapse of time between the Divine and Human Comedies. Dante began to write the Divina Commedia around 1308. Dante completed Paradiso, the final part, shortly before his death in September 1321. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in his age of mid-to-late thirties, written between 1348 and 1353. So depending on whether we’re considering the beginning of composition or completion, the gap is somewhere between 32 to 40 years between the two works.

Though Boccaccio is highly identified with the Florentine Renaissance, he spent his youth in Naples, where he most likely built his insightful observation of human nature. He reluctantly moved to Florence with his family and he aways identified with Naples and thought poorly of Florence (as we see of other Florentine Renaissance figures at the time). Naples was actually the more of the intellectual hotspot at the time. With philosophers, writers, and artists flocking to Naples rather than Florence. Note how every time a character is introduced from Naples, Bocaccio refers to it as the best city in the world, and when he speaks of Florence, he remarks of it as a city of moral corruption.

The majority of the book’s stories are about love, or rather are about sexual desire, but in doing so are exploring the cunning intelligence humans go to fulfil their desires or evade their troubles, how they outwit each other, or are too foolish to see they are being duped. Yet surrounding it all is also the idea of changes of Fortune; bad circumstances come to good, a sunny morning may be brief, a single drop of rain could mean more to come, or good fortune may turn worse just when we become confident. That life has a quite capricious nature, and that's precisely the justification for why the stories' characters are so intelligent in their tricks. Dante called Fortune "a general minister and guide" (Inferno Canto VII).  Ovid calls Fortune "the unstable goddess" Epistles IV. By the early 16th century in the time of Machiavelli, this view of Fortune had changed through the development of Renaissance Humanism, where humans have a little bit more agency in the matter. Machiavelli's whole philosophy is a wrestle between virtù and Fortuna, where Fortuna could be handled through Prudence. In Boccaccio's 14th century, he writes of characters under the hand of Fortune with more of a stoic fortitude. Love is the trial, Intelligence is applied to fulfil desires, and Fortune intervenes.

There is remarkable psychological accuracy to his characters. What's interesting is that he didn't have the advances of psychological inquiry that the Modern age has undergone. Modern psychology is an endless labyrinth of self-examination that has no end. I think it was driven by Protestantism which is all about constant self-examination, and psychology in the modern sense develops strongly out of that. Catholicism is far more externally focused on its spectacle, ritual, metaphysical architecture, which Protestantism from its beginning rejects in favour of God, the Word, oneself. Protestantism is more of a psychology than it is a religion. A psychology of the dissolved world. Boccaccio's psychological realism is precisely due to an embracing and observation of the world. Compare the difference between Dante's Roman Catholic Divine Comedy and John Milton's Protestant Anglican Church Paradise Lost, and we easily see Dante creates a metaphysical architecture, and Milton creates a psychological labyrinth. Boccaccio was able to create such psychological realism because their psychology emanates from behaviours. Behaviour is personality. Furthermore, he understand that the world presents recurrent types. That's why The Decameron is still relatable today. They do not lack psychological depth; they simply do not reduce their behaviour to rationalised explanation. Boccaccio has a realist's view of human nature. He sees our best and our worst at the same time, without moral sentimentality.

This mentality relates to the times too. The economy of Europe had transitioned from feudal to entrepreneurial mercantilism, preceding what would become capitalism that emerged out of the Renaissance. Characters are divided between those who lead and those react. Success is often won by deception and surprise. Though Boccaccio isn't necessarily demeaning honesty and moral decorum, he is advocating for intelligence to thrive in a world of moral corruption to avoid being the dupe of it.

One of my favourite things about it is the liberality that it presents women. Male commentaries of the book describe its women as having an unfaithfulness towards men. But I think Boccaccio is here showing a truth too. That women think about sex just as much as men, maybe more, and possibly enjoy it more than men too. Which is a refreshing image of women compared to the celibate chaste idea of women who is supposed to find sex dirty if she is to be a lady. That's not to say anything about high body counts, which is still a culturally controversial topic to discuss but I have my views on it. But there's no shame in recognising that women enjoy sex and thinking about sex just as much as men. Boccaccio champions female sexual desire. Hence, the church removed so much of the book and it wasn't until the 19th century that it was translated in full. No woman is unaware of the power of her beauty over the human condition. Even butterflies are as dumb as regular flies, but we forgive them because they are more beautiful. What male commentaries are frustrated with is that the women of the stories have no interest to conform their attitudes to the desires of men but seek their own pleasures, behaving with their own agency to sexual gratification. Boccaccio actually writes in the opening that he wrote the book for women who are currently sad in love. Male commentaries call Boccaccio's women deceptive and liars, but these are simply men who misunderstand women. And their ego of both manliness and intelligence is broken on the truth. For women to supress their sexual nature, Boccaccio would find to betray nature. In most cases when a woman chooses another suitor, Boccaccio places blame on the dupe of the husband for not seeing reality as it is.

NUMEROLOGY AND NAMES

The characters move from the city to the countryside, from the church to the garden, from plague to peace, from sorrows to joys. April is more than a time of flowers — it's the mating season, the return of light and life. Boccaccio knew his Ovid and Virgil, and steeped his tales in the erotic logic of spring. Just as Dante explicitly sets the Divina Commedia in the springtime, Boccaccio sets his Decameron in a pagan Primavera meets a Christian Holy Week. The cyclical world of eros, rebirth, and earthly pleasures. Boccaccio is placing his secular, humanistic project of storytelling directly within the most sacred Christian time.

In Divina Commedia, Dante’s journey begins on April 8, 1300 — Good Friday. We know this from inference of internal clues and astronomical references (especially in Paradiso and the Inferno). Dante emerges with Virgil from Hell on April 10, 1300 — Easter Sunday — and ascends to Paradise through Purgatory over the following week.

The storytellers of The Decameron gather on Tuesday, April 5 1348 then they begin storytelling on Wednesday, April 6 1348. They skip the first Friday out of respect for Jesus' crucifixion because it is Good Friday, and they skip Saturday because on Saturdays the ladies wash their hair. So the entire escape to the countryside lasts two weeks. They also change locations on the first Sunday to avoid attracting others. So they tell stories on five days per week. The tenth and final day of storytelling in the Decameron is Tuesday, April 19, 1348. While the ten storytelling days span two weeks (from April 6 to April 19, excluding Fridays and Saturdays), Boccaccio includes a final frame narrative that takes place the next day on Wednesday the 20th.

No one wrote prose fiction with any real seriousness at the time. Each of the ten days ends with a poem, as a song, and probably to be sung aloud. The songs take influence from troubadour music of the time, which I feel was the true Renaissance music, not the music that we call Renaissance music of the 16th century. In the 14th century, Latin was still the dominant language of the church, law, science education, and high literature. As with Petrarch and Dante, Boccaccio wrote in vernacular Tuscan Italian. For a serious book writing in the vernacular ordinary language of the people was considered low style. It's hard to think that Dante's Divina Commedia was in the low style. Petrarch's epic Latin poem about the Roman hero Scipio Africanus defeating Hannibal is universally poorly read compared to Dante's Divina Commedia or Petrach's own Il Canzoniere which was written in vernacular. But this low style is suited to the erotic and satirical themes of The Decameron.

The Decameron was primarily intended to be read aloud — either to a group or by one person to another — though by Boccaccio’s time, silent reading was also emerging among the literate elite. In the early and high Middle Ages, almost all reading was vocal, even when done alone. This practice is known as subvocalization or murmured reading. Boccaccio himself was one of the first European authors to read Dante’s Commedia silently, deeply, personally — even annotating it. The book in its time would be for reading aloud with guests, perhaps during Easter festivities. Therefore, like the characters, the guests would literally read the stories to other guests, in the ordinary language they spoke.

The low style didn't prevent Boccaccio, like Dante, from making his literature high art. As for the storytellers in the book, there are multiple interpretations of the names attributed to the narrators:

Women:

Elissa = the alternative name of Dido from Virgil's Aeneid, the queen of Carthage. Her themes are clever rebukes that save from embarrassment or danger.

Emilia = the alluring. She has no fixed theme. People can choose whatever theme they want.

Fiammetta = little flame (Temperance) with themes of love with a happy ending (Fiammetta was also a woman loved by Boccaccio).

Filomena = the beloved (Fortitude) with themes of misfortune turned to a happy ending.

Lauretta = refers to Pettarch's Laura whose name comes from laurel, the plant symbol of glory (Justice). Her themes are of those tricks people play on each other.

Neìfile = newly enamoured. But refers to the poetry of a new style. Her themes are the clever tricks to gain sexual satisfaction.

Pampinea  = ("the lush one") (Prudence). Her themes are of intelligence prevails over misfortune.

Men:

Filostrato = defeated by love (Anger) his themes are tragic love stories.

Panfilo = all loving (Reason) his themes are stories of noble or heroic deeds and acts of virtue.

Dioneo = Lusty. Dione, mother of Venus in Homer’s Iliad. His theme for his day is adulterous wives. All of Dioneo's stories are erotic and his chair's the seventh day which is of bawdy and lewd stories. The music he chooses for the seventh day entertainment are bagpipes, which were still associated with Priapus (the god with the huge cock) in Boccaccio's time. This implies a loose, carefree, ecstatic character. Dioneo is the one who tells the most bawdy and salacious tales. After the first day, he tells the final story of each day. He is the king on the seventh day, which as far as we know are tales invented by Bocaccio himself, which implies that Dioneo has something of Boccaccio in his character, at least in his humour.

The three great Italian poets of the Renaissance each have their Ancient Roman equivalents. Dante = Virgil; Petrarch = Horace; Boccaccio = Ovid. But it's also as if Boccaccio presents his three male figures as the three of them. Dante = Panfilo; Petrarch = Filostrato; Boccaccio = Dioneo.

There is no theme for the first day, but in general its intelligence applied to out-wit Fortune. A general theme overall for The Decameron.

If we think of each day in a circle. We see.

Day 10 (Panfilo): Nobility, self-overcoming, transcendence — the summit

Day 5 (Fiammetta): Romantic fulfilment, springtime joy, earthly love — the root

Boccaccio mixes pagan and Christian numerology in his use of the number 10. In Pythagorean numerology, the number 10 was the most perfect number — called the Tetractys, the sum of the first four integers: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. Therefore, 10 symbolised the entire structure of the cosmos. In the Bible and Christian Symbolism, 10 is not only associated with ten commandments but the metaphysical architecture of the cosmos. The Ten Spheres of the cosmos in some cosmological models (Earth + 9 celestial spheres). Therefore, Bocaccio uses ten days of storytelling, by ten storytellers possibly made up of (women) seven contrary virtues and (men) three theological virtues.

Just as Dante brought in real people into his poetic universe, Boccaccio refers to characters who are true, and characters that are fictional but based on true people. Calandrino, was a real painter, but his name evokes "simpleton" or dim-witted, easily fooled. He appears in four stories, (VIII.3, VIII.6, IX.3, IX.5)., with two characters who always get the better of him, named Bruno and Buffalmacco, who was a painter also. These were actually based on Boccaccio's contemporaries. Calandrino and Buffalmacco feature in at least four tales in The Decameron. Although none of his work survives. Giorgio Vasari writes of him in his Lives of the most extraordinary painters, sculptors, and architects. Casandrino was a painter, called Nozzo di Perino, but nothing is really known about his real character. One of Boccaccio’s few directly named references to a real contemporary is the painter Giotto (c. 1267–1337) who had died just a decade before the Decameron was written. He was a pioneer of naturalistic painting, and widely revered in Florence. He also mentions his predecessor Cimabue. “Cimabue thought he held the field in painting, but now Giotto has the cry...” Others who are also mentioned are King Charles I of Anjou of Naples, and the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti who was a close friend of Dante.

SANTA MARIA NOVELLA

Obviously, a real architectural building is mentioned too. The church of Santa Maria Novella which remains in Florence today. The Church of Santa Maria Novella is the church the women are gathered in when they decide to take flight of the city to the countryside. The Dominican Order commissioned the church. Work began work around 1279, building over an earlier 9th-century oratory.

Santa Maria Novella was already a major Dominican church by 1348 and fully active during the plague. While its later visual identity is strongly associated with Andrea Orcagna’s Strozzi Chapel frescoes (c. 1354–57), these were completed after Boccaccio had written the Decameron. The famous facade of Santa Maria Novella, with its green-and-white marble and classical proportions, was completed much later by Leon Battista Alberti in the mid-15th century (1456–1470), long after Boccaccio’s time. Boccaccio saw only the unfinished brick facade, likely quite plain.

Though the word Novella now refers to a short novel, during Bocaccio’s time it wasn’t, and the word Novella is referring to that the church was built on the site of an earlier oratory (Santa Maria delle Vigne). So the "novella" here simply means new.

LEGACY

Pier Paolo Pasolini made a film of several of the stories in his Il Decameron (1971). But I felt the tone, pacing, vibe was unlike Boccaccio's storytelling. I thought Boccaccio '70 (1962) by Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli and Luchino Visconti was more like Boccaccio in spirit. Particularly, Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio, directed by Federico Fellini;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX1aP-Fg_ag

and La Riffa directed by Vittorio De Sica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zv7OO12wjA

Some of my favourite stories from The Decameron are, well, none from the first day if I’m honest. But from the others:

DAY II – Fortune Reversed into Happiness

II.2

II.3

II.9

II.10

DAY III – Desire Achieved through Ingenuity

III.1

III.2

III.3

III.6

III.10

DAY V – Love Ending Happily

V.4

V.10

DAY VI – Wit as Salvation

VI.7

VI.9

DAY VII – Women Outsmart Husbands

VII.1

VII.2

VII.5

VII.9

VII.10

DAY VIII – Trickery Without Gender Limits

VIII.3

VIII.4

VIII.8

VIII.10

DAY IX – Miscellaneous

IX.4

DAY X – Nobility and Magnanimity

X.8

X.9

X.10

If you ever read it, that may be a good guide.

I’ll give an overview of one. Though it's not a funny one but easier to summarise than a funny one. It's more or less the story Shakespeare adapted into Cymbeline.

Second Day, Ninth Story – Bernabò and Zinevra

A theme of female intelligence against male vanity.

Some merchants are somewhere near Paris and they’re talking about how they always cheat on their wives when they’re away on business, because they know back home their wives aren’t letting the grass grow beneath their feet. But one merchant, Bernabò, says he doesn’t agree with that and that he has a wife who is faithful. One of the merchants, Ambrogiuolo, laughs at him and presents a wager that he could seduce Bernabò’s wife Zinevra. The wager is reluctantly accepted by Bernabò after the other merchants mock him. Ambrogiuolo then goes to Italy and persuades a servant and friend of the house to put him inside a chest and carry him to Bernabò wife’s bedroom concealed inside. After some persuasion she agrees. Once inside the bedroom when everyone is asleep, Ambrogiuolo opens the chest and steps out of it. He looks around the room, committing every detail to memory, and then lifts the covers of the bed to see Zinevra's body. Ambrogiuolo removes her clothes and inspects the details. He sees that there is a little golden hair near one of her breasts. He covers her back up, takes some of the jewellery from the room, and climbs back inside the chest. On Ambrogiuolo’s return to Paris he gives the details of the room, and shows the jewellery, to the Bernabò, which Ambrogiuolo says Zinevra gave him as a gift after making love to her. But he isn’t believed since anyone could have told him of those details or acquired those items. So Ambrogiuolo says that near her breast is a golden hair. Bernabò is in despair. He returns to Italy with murder in his heart. He hires a man to kill his wife. The assassin takes Zinevra on a walk to the countryside and then prepares to kill her. Zinevra is alarmed and implores to spare her life since she has done nothing wrong and can’t understand why her husband would hire someone to kill her. The assassin accepts and exchanges his coat for her clothes as evidence he killed her, gives her some money, and tells her to leave the country. Zinevra meets an old lady who owns an inn who gives her some clothes and cuts her hair so she can take on the appearance of a man. Zinevra then joins a crew as a sailor and becomes wealthy and renowned. In the place the ships stops she goes to a market where she happens to run into Ambrogiuolo selling items. Zinevra looks at some of the items he is selling and recognises her own jewellery. Still perceived to be a man, Zinevra asks him where he got them from. Ambrogiuolo laughs and tells her the same story he told her husband. She realises what had happened, and through cunning decides to join the Ambrogiuolo’s crew and be of service. After some time and then have become close, and she becomes further renown, she is well received by a Sultan, who asks if he can fulfil any of his (but her) requests. Zinevra requests to have two men brought to his presence. Bernabò and Ambrogiuol. She demands they explain what happened all those years ago and Ambrogiuolo explains his side, and her husbands explains how he had his wife murdered. The Sultan listens but is confused why this meeting was arranged. Zinevra then eveals herself as her true identity, and the foul merchant is terrified and her husband ashamed. The Sultan is surprised too, but rewards her for her ingenuity and has Ambrogiuolo tied up, held high on a pole, smeared with honey and left for the bees.