It is the summer of 1348. The Black Death has emptied the city of Florence. Half the population has died in three months. In the church of Santa Maria Novella, by chance, seven young women meet on the same morning. They decide to leave the city. Three young men join them. They walk to a country villa in the Tuscan hills. They will stay there for ten days, and each day each of them will tell one story — a hundred stories in all.
Boccaccio finished Il Decamerone around 1353. It is the founding text of Italian prose, the model for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the source of more European folktales than almost any other single book. The stories are about clever wives, foolish husbands, false saints, real saints, lovers in jars, lovers in pots of basil, talking falcons, patient Griseldas, and at least one extended joke about how religious orders work.
The A2 adaptation collects fifteen of the most famous tales (Federigo's falcon, the patient Griselda, Cisti the baker, the three rings, Andreuccio of Perugia, plus the frame story of the plague itself). Boccaccio's Italian is medieval — older than Dante, in places — but the A2 retelling brings the structure and the punchlines to clean modern Italian.
Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in a Tuscan vernacular that, six hundred years later, is still close enough to modern Italian to be readable. The frame structure — ten storytellers, ten days, one hundred tales — gives the book a natural episodic rhythm: each chapter is a complete short story with a beginning, middle, and end. A2 is the right level for this kind of episodic structure: you read one chapter, you understand it, you close the book until tomorrow.
Elementary. You handle simple past tense, basic dialogue, and short connected paragraphs. Vocabulary is around 1,500 words. You can describe what you read.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Decameron was originally written in Italian, but you choose your reading language when you start.
A2. Elementary. You handle simple past tense, basic dialogue, and short connected paragraphs. Vocabulary is around 1,500 words. You can describe what you read.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Decameron is rated A2, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
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