The Decameron, Volume I

About this book

Ten young people leave plague-stricken Florence for a country retreat and pass the days by telling stories. They give themselves rules, appoint a daily leader and fill the hours with invented lives.

Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron moves between wit, cruelty, desire, luck and the absurdity of social pretension. The opening account of the Black Death lends the frame an unforgettable seriousness, even as the tales turn comic or scandalous. Volume I begins a vast portrait of human behaviour told by people determined to make life continue around them.