In the summer of 1348, the Black Death arrived in the Tuscan port of Pisa and walked north into Florence. By autumn it had killed somewhere between half and two-thirds of the city. Whole streets emptied. Notaries gave up trying to keep up with the wills. The Florentine chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani wrote that there were not enough living to bury the dead, that bodies were stacked in trenches "like cheese between layers of pasta." Giovanni Boccaccio — thirty-five years old, son of a Florentine banker, friend of Petrarch, lover of Latin classics — watched it happen. Five years later he had written a book of one hundred stories framed by that plague. It opens like this:
Dico adunque che già erano gli anni della fruttifera incarnazione del Figliuolo di Dio al numero pervenuti di milletrecentoquarantotto, quando nella egregia città di Fiorenze, oltre a ogn'altra italica bellissima, pervenne la mortifera pestilenza…
I say, then, that the years of the fruitful incarnation of the Son of God had reached the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the noble city of Florence — fairest of any in Italy — the deadly pestilence arrived.
What most readers carry around about the Decameron, if they carry anything beyond the title, is that it is a foundational text of Italian literature, that it has something to do with the plague, and that there are stories nested inside other stories. All true. What gets dropped from the high-school summary: at least a quarter of the hundred stories are about people in beds they shouldn't be in. Wives hide lovers in wine casks. Friars seduce widows in the middle of confession. A naïve teenager in the North African desert learns from a hermit that the most pious thing a young woman can do for God is to "put the devil back in hell" — Boccaccio's deadpan euphemism for what they are very obviously doing. The Counter-Reformation eventually put the Decameron on the Index of Forbidden Books and kept it there for the next three hundred and fifty years. The book is on the Italian shelf at Storica because it is, in fact, the foundation of Italian prose. It is also funnier and filthier than the canon usually advertises.
The frame is a quarantine
Boccaccio sets the action just outside Florence. Ten young Florentines — seven women, three men, all in their late teens and twenties — meet by chance in the church of Santa Maria Novella, decide that the city has become unbearable, and retreat to a country villa in the hills above Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the time they tell stories. Each day one of them is named king or queen for the day, and assigns a theme; the other nine then tell a story on it. They stay fourteen days but only tell stories on ten of them — Fridays and Saturdays are kept for prayer and for the women to wash their hair. Ten storytellers, ten days, ten stories per day. One hundred stories total. The form was new.
The themes grow edgier as the book goes on. Day 1 is free choice. Day 2 is people who come into good fortune after great misery. Day 3 is people who get what they want by cleverness. Day 4 is love stories that end badly; Day 5, love stories that end well. By Day 7 the assigned subject is "tricks wives play on their husbands." Day 8 is "tricks women play on men, men on women, and men on each other." Day 9 is free choice again. Day 10, finally, is tales of magnanimity, as if Boccaccio felt he owed the reader a wash. The Decameron's reputation lives on Days 7, 8, and 9.
The stories are dirty as hell
The most famous of the bawdy ones is the last story of Day 3 — Alibech and Rustico, the hermit. Alibech is fourteen, the daughter of a wealthy man in the North African town of Capsa, and has heard the Christians who live in her father's house say that the surest path to God is to flee into the desert. So she does. She wanders into the Egyptian wilderness alone and asks the first hermit she finds how to serve God. He sends her further on, judging her too pretty to be his problem. She finally reaches a young hermit named Rustico, who agrees to take her in, then spends a sleepless night realising that the most useful service he could ask of her is a very specific physical one. He explains to her, in the morning, that his erection is "the devil," and that her body contains "hell," and that the most pleasing act a faithful woman can perform is to "put the devil back in hell." Alibech, eager to be pious, throws herself into the work with such enthusiasm that the hermit is eventually broken by it. The narrator — a young woman named Dioneo, who always tells the last story of the day, and is exempt from the day's theme — ends by saying that this was how Alibech learned to serve God, and that the lesson is one all good women would do well to learn.
Padre mio, che cosa è quella che io vi veggio così avere, che io non l'ho? — Oh, figliuola mia, disse Rustico, questo è il diavolo di che io t'ho ragionato.
"Father, what is that thing I see you have, that I do not?" — "Oh, my daughter," said Rustico, "this is the devil I told you about."
That is one of a hundred. Another, from Day 7, is Peronella and the cask. Peronella's husband, a poor mason, comes home unexpectedly one morning. Her lover, Giannello, is already in the bedroom. She tells him to climb into the empty wine cask in the courtyard, then meets the husband at the door and scolds him: he has come home too early and ruined her chance to sell the cask to a buyer she had finally found. The husband, delighted she has found one, helps drag him in. Giannello, prompted by Peronella, climbs out the other side of the cask, pretends to inspect it, finds it dirty, and tells the husband to climb inside and scrub it. While the husband is upside-down inside the cask scraping at the staves, Giannello finishes what he had started with Peronella, against the cask, in plain sight. Boccaccio describes the geometry in the language of a mason finishing a piece of work. The husband, oblivious, hands Giannello the seven gigliati they had agreed on for the cask and helps him carry it home.
There are seventy more in this register. Friars, abbesses, nuns, scholars, peasant women, jealous husbands, oblivious husbands, occasionally a saint. A common pattern is that the wives outsmart the husbands, the women outsmart the men, and the cloistered outsmart the ones who think the cloistered are stupid. Boccaccio's narrators apologise, periodically, for the unsuitable nature of what they are about to say. They tell the story anyway.
The Church was furious
For the first two hundred years, the Decameron circulated freely. It was the most-read secular book in Italy, and one of the most-read in Europe. Petrarch read it and loved the last story — Griselda, the patient wife, the most chaste of the hundred — well enough to translate it into Latin himself. Editions were printed in Venice, Florence, Naples, and as far north as Lyon and Antwerp. Pirate copies appeared across Europe before the term pirate edition existed.
Then the Counter-Reformation arrived. The 1559 Pauline Index of Forbidden Books — the first universal Catholic index — placed the Decameron on the list. Owning a copy was a crime. By 1573, the Vatican commissioned an "expurgated" edition, edited by Lionardo Salviati. Friars became magicians. Abbesses became countesses. Priests became gentlemen. The Alibech story disappeared entirely. The expurgated Decameron, with its plot intact but its targets relabelled, became the version most Italian Catholics read for the next three centuries. The original kept circulating in Protestant Europe — particularly in Holland and England — and slipped back into Italy through pirate editions throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth. The complete text was not legally available in Italy again until well into the nineteenth century.
The book has now been continuously in print, in some version, for six hundred and seventy years. The expurgated Salviati version is a curiosity in rare-book rooms. What is sold under the title Decameron today is what Boccaccio wrote in 1353.
This is the Italian everyone spoke
Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the Florentine vernacular, not in Latin. This is one of the few things "literary Italian" still concretely means: the Tuscan dialect of fourteenth-century Florence, codified by Dante (in the Comedy), Petrarch (in the Canzoniere), and Boccaccio (in the Decameron). The three of them are called le tre corone, the three crowns, for exactly this reason. When Italy unified in the 1860s and needed a national language, the language it picked was the language of these three Tuscans. Modern standard Italian is closer to what Boccaccio wrote in 1353 than modern French is to what Villon wrote in 1456 or modern English is to what Chaucer wrote in 1387.
What this means for an Italian learner is that the Decameron's vocabulary is almost shockingly current. The objects are concrete and household: il letto, la tavola, il vino, la moglie, il marito, il prete, il villaggio. The verbs are the most common Italian verbs: andare, venire, vedere, sapere, dire, fare. The syntax has a handful of period markers — older subjunctives, the occasional inversion, a few archaic conjunctions — but the spine of a sentence is the spine of a sentence you would write today. Boccaccio was not writing for scholars. He was writing for the people who told these stories in markets and taverns. The Italian he used was the Italian they spoke.
Everyone stole the structure
The frame-story collection — a fixed group of characters in a fixed location telling stories in turn — was not invented by Boccaccio. The Arabian Nights got there four centuries earlier; so did certain Sanskrit and Persian collections. But Boccaccio invented the European version. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387) is a direct adaptation with the pilgrimage road as the frame instead of the country villa. Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (1558) is a French copy with seven days instead of ten. Basile's Pentamerone (1634) is a Neapolitan copy of fairy tales told over five. Cervantes was reading Boccaccio while he started Don Quixote — he names him in print and lifts at least one plot. The hundred-story frame, written down in five years by a banker's son with nothing else to do during a plague, is one of the few inventions in literary form whose author we can actually name.
It is also the form that everything later in narrative prose either uses or argues with. Sterne's Tristram Shandy uses it ironically. Joyce's Dubliners argues with it. The TV anthology is a direct descendant. The Netflix dump is a direct descendant. The dance between a frame and the stories nested inside it is the same dance whether Boccaccio's narrators are in Fiesole in 1348 or a writers' room is in Burbank in 2026.
What pairs with it on the Italian shelf
If you read the Decameron and want more on the Italian shelf, the natural pairing is the only other major Italian title at Storica: Pinocchio. Collodi wrote it in 1881, five hundred years after Boccaccio, but in roughly the same Tuscan vernacular — it is not an accident that Italian as a national language was codified in nineteenth-century Tuscany on the back of the tradition Boccaccio launched. Pinocchio is at A1, a step easier than the Decameron, and the same moral pessimism Boccaccio brought to his friars Collodi brings to his fox and his cat.
If you finish the Decameron and want to follow the form Boccaccio invented into a different language, the natural next book is Don Quixote. Cervantes is the next great Latin-tradition writer who is unmistakably a novelist in our sense, and he was reading Boccaccio while he wrote. Both are at A2+ in target-language adaptations. The line from Florence in 1348 to Seville in 1605 to Madame Bovary in 1856 to whatever you are reading now is one continuous thread, and the Decameron is the first knot in it.
I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. The Decameron sits on the Italian shelf at A2 — adapted into twenty-five short chapters that keep the frame story, the bawdiest tales, and the Florentine humour intact. Fifteen minutes a day, write a short reply at the end of each chapter, and you will have read the foundational text of European prose — in Italian — in less than a month.