On Monday 31 January 2022, in a session entitled “Florence, 1348: The Black Death,” we read from Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on the Introduction to the First Day . We read the Italian text from Vittore Branca’s 1992 edition and the English text from the 1903 translation by M.J. Rigg.

Both can be found here as part of the Decameron Web project at Brown University. This reading was the first in a series on literary plagues (the others being Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death,” Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Albert Camus’ La peste).

Famously, at the beginning of Day 1, Boccaccio describes the plague of 1348 in Florence, which spread like a fire (“just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it”). He describes not only the physical effects of the plagues, starting with its typical gavoccioli (swellings), but also its moral effects on the population:

“how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

From the 1348 plague originates the frame narrative in which all the stories of the Decameron are contained: because, “on a Tuesday morning […] [in] the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella” in Florence, seven young ladies decide to seek refuge in the countryside—and there, they tell all the stories of the Decameron. Not just the seven young ladies, though: before leaving Florence, they make sure that three young men join them, because:

“We are sensitive, perverse, suspicious, pusillanimous and timid; wherefore I much misdoubt, that, if we find no other guidance than our own, this company is like to break up sooner, and with less credit to us, than it should. Against which it were well to provide at the outset.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

Their description of the gentle sex would not please women and feminist of today. But can’t we also see a remarkable sense of agency in this “provision” that these women make for their retreat in the countryside?

One last point: many, of course, have recalled Boccaccio’s description of the plague during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, one of the most interesting ways to reconnect with the Decameron was to re-enact it. Among the most notable outcomes of this idea are the New York Times’ Decameron Project (2020), in English, and the Nuovo Decameron (Harper Collins Italia, 2021), in Italian.