Giovanni Boccaccio and the Decameron: life, structure, summary

A Florentine raised between Naples and books

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, perhaps in Certaldo but more likely in Florence, sometime between June and July. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant, who sent him to Naples, perhaps in autumn 1327: first to learn the trade at the house of the Bardi family, then to study canon law. In Naples he used the Royal Library, and through it came into contact with scholars and writers at court.

He returned to Florence in the winter of 1340-41, during a period of financial crisis for his family. Those were the years of his first works in the vernacular: the Commedia delle ninfe fiorentine (1341-42), the poem L’amorosa visione (1342-43), the novel Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343-44) and the short poem Ninfale fiesolano (1344-46). The masterpiece came later.

The frame story: ten narrators fleeing the plague

In 1348, the year the plague struck Florence, Boccaccio was in the city again. That plague arrived near the end of the long historical period scholars call the Middle Ages, which the Recap on the Middle Ages covers in full, from feudalism to the Crusades. It is the backdrop Boccaccio chose for his masterpiece, written, according to the most widely accepted estimate, between 1349 and 1353: ten young people — seven women, Pampinea, Filomena, Neifile, Fiammetta, Elisa, Lauretta and Emilia, and three men, Filostrato, Dioneo and Panfilo — leave Florence for the countryside to escape the contagion.

There, they tell each other one story each per day for ten days: ten days, ten tales each, one hundred in total, preceded by a proem and an introduction. The book’s name comes straight from this structure: it derives from the Greek déka hēmérai, meaning ten days.

A useful example: the difference between a tale and a novel shows up right here. A Decameron tale — like the one about Andreuccio of Perugia, covered further below — closes within a single episode, with a beginning and an end fitted into a few pages. A novel such as Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed instead follows a single plot that runs across hundreds of pages, with characters who return from chapter to chapter.

The Treccani encyclopedia entry points to the contrast between the orderly life the group chooses and the disorder of the plague-stricken city: it is the frame that gives the tales their meaning, not just a device for stringing one hundred stories together.

Fortune and cleverness, the thread running through the tales

Many of the Decameron’s tales share an underlying theme: the relationship between fortune and human intelligence. Chance decides people’s fates unpredictably and seems to escape every attempt to bend it by sheer force of will; because of this, in Boccaccio’s characters, cleverness learns to work with it.

One reason the Decameron is a turning point for Italian prose is the language itself: the Treccani entry describes a prose that reads naturally while being carefully constructed, free of the mannerisms common to the schools of the time.

Andreuccio of Perugia, the most-searched tale

Among the hundred tales, the story of Andreuccio of Perugia, on the second day, as the fifth tale, is one of the most famous. It follows a naive young provincial who arrives in Naples and falls victim to a string of swindles, getting drawn into the adventures of the city’s underworld.

A useful example: it is the fortune-and-cleverness pattern applied to a single character. Andreuccio loses everything through naivety, but comes out of trouble — with a new fortune — thanks to chance and a cunning he picks up firsthand over the course of a single night.

This same tale is one of the ten Pier Paolo Pasolini chose for his film The Decameron (1971), with Ninetto Davoli playing Andreuccio.

Boccaccio, Dante and Petrarch: the Three Crowns

Alongside Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, Boccaccio forms what tradition calls the Three Crowns of Italian literature. Dante, who died years before Boccaccio and Petrarch reached their full maturity as writers, was a model for both of them: his work, covered in full in the Recap on the Divine Comedy, became a point of reference for the writers who came after him.

Boccaccio had a different relationship with each of the other two. With Dante, whom he never met in person, the link ran through the texts: he became one of Dante’s first editors and gave what scholars regard as the first public lecture series on record, a series of public lessons on the Comedy. With Francesco Petrarch, the relationship was personal instead: the two met several times, and in March 1351 Boccaccio returned a visit from Petrarch by travelling to see him in Padua.

After the Decameron: the scholarly works

In the years after his masterpiece in the vernacular, Boccaccio turned to scholarly works in Latin. De casibus virorum illustrium had a first version between 1356 and 1360 and a second, longer one, dedicated to his friend Mainardo Cavalcanti, in 1373. De mulieribus claris followed a similar path: a first draft in 1361, then a revised version dedicated to Andrea Acciaiuoli in 1362.

Boccaccio died in Certaldo on 21 December 1375.