Step 3 of 4

Il Decameron: un vero capolavoro

The sculptor placed an unlocked book in his hands. In his niche he stands, but Boccaccio's finger between the middle of the unlocked book gives his viewers the feeling that he would rather keep on reading. Or was he writing something?

And write he did. Of all of Boccaccio's written work, the Decameron was his true masterpiece. It is a collection of a hundred stories in the Florentine vernacular. It is structured as a frame story in which ten narrators (the brigata), seven girls and three boys, tell ten stories in the span of ten days with each day having a different theme. The stories can be tragic as well as comical and often carry a moral lesson or message. The youngsters reside outside of the city of Florence to escape the Black Death that was tormenting the city at the time and tell each other tales in order to find distraction from the situation.

There are noted differences in the use of language due to the different narrators each story has. The subtitle of this great piece of work, Prencipe Galeotto, refers to the fifth canto of Dante’s Divina Commedia, a love story in which the protagonists Paolo and Francesca recount how they were brought together by reading a certain book from the Arthurian Cycle, where Galeotto (Galehaut), impersonates the matchmaker between Lancelot and Guinevere (Lancilotto e Ginevra). The Decameron is meant to help women with questions about love and to help those who suffer from heartbreak by guiding, comforting and distracting them. Boccaccio dedicating his work to women led to many criticisms at the time, to which he himself responds brilliantly and firmly in the introduction of the fourth day: his autodifesa.

Boccaccio is known as the writer who introduced the “narrative frame” (cornice narrativa) in literature. The structure of the Decameron is complex; there’s a frame story that includes, comments and connects the various tales of which the work is composed. Through the ages, this structure has been implemented by writers all over the world, like Geoffrey Chaucer with The Canterbury Tales and Giambattista Basile with the Pentamerone.

But the influence of Boccaccio is not limited to literature. Several stories from the Decameron were adapted for theatre and film. Famous examples are Il Decameron , a movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maraviglioso Boccaccio of the Taviani brothers. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, many artists returned to Boccaccio’s Decameron to reflect about the present. The International Theater of Amsterdam (ITA), the collective Ildecameron2.0, and many other groups decided to repeat the storytelling of the brigata. For 100 days, actors and intellectuals tell a different story from the Decamerone. Nuovo Decameron and Decameron2020 are editorial projects where stories of confinement are actualized. We can see how Boccaccio still inspires artists and their audience with his masterpiece to this day.