The single stories are very short and range from love stories to stories of death, with a lot of inappropriate humour thrown it. I just read one day’s worth of stories per day and ten days later I was done. I had so much fun reading this! The book is set over ten days and each day has ten stories, one from each of the people sheltering in the village, which made it so easy to read. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic, with life lessons and practical jokes mixed in. The Decameron is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of young women and young men sheltering in a villa outside Florence to escape the Black Death. It was originally written in the Florentine dialect of Italian and wasn’t translated into English until 1620, and even then it was only a partial translation. The Decameron is a collection of novellas written by Giovanni Boccaccio sometime between 13. Themes are playfully restated from one story to another within an elegant and refined framework.

Boccaccio’s skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in this virtuoso performance of one hundred tales, vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots which revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions. Summary: In a country villa outside the city, ten young noble men and women who have escaped the plague decide to tell each other stories.

The decameron book