The Decameron (1971): Pasolini's Boccaccio Adaptation in Naples

From Florence to Naples: a scaled-down project

The Decameron came out in 1971 and won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was presented on 29 June of that year. It is the first chapter of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life.

The Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini in Casarsa della Delizia describes a wider original plan than the one that reached the screen: in Pasolini’s own account, beyond Naples the film was meant to include Sicily, North Africa, Paris, the Norman castles of southern Italy, the Loire castles, and even a desert with casbahs. In the final version, that geographic ambition narrows almost entirely to Naples, in the Angevin era, with filming split between Casertavecchia, the Church of Santa Chiara, Palazzo Penna and the Amalfi coast, plus a few scenes in castles in Trentino.

Critic Alberto Moravia, reviewing the finished film, observed that in place of the tidy order of the book’s Florence, the film gives us the crowded working-class alleys of Naples, and in place of the Tuscan countryside, the countryside of Campania. It is one of the sharpest departures from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which stays set in fourteenth-century Florence.

The stories chosen, between Boccaccio and the screen

Of the roughly one hundred stories that make up Boccaccio’s book, the film stages a group of around ten. Here the sources don’t fully agree on the exact number: two articles from the Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini reach different totals, nine in one case and ten in the other. This Recap leaves the discrepancy open and lists the stories on which the two lists overlap.

Story	Reference	Known performer
Ser Ciappelletto	I, 1	Franco Citti
Andreuccio da Perugia	II, 5	Ninetto Davoli
Masetto da Lamporecchio	III, 1	—
Lisabetta da Messina	IV, 5	—
Caterina di Valbona	V, 4	—
Giotto’s pupil	VI, 5	Pier Paolo Pasolini
Peronella	VII, 2	—
Tingoccio and Meuccio	VII, 10	—
Gemmata	IX, 10	—

A tenth story, that of Isabetta and the abbess Usimbalda (IX, 2), appears in one of the two Centro Studi lists but not the other: it is probably the source of the nine-versus-ten discrepancy noted above.

Cast and locations

Among the actors Pasolini chose, two names recur often in his cinema of those years: Franco Citti, who plays Ser Ciappelletto, and Ninetto Davoli, in the role of Andreuccio da Perugia.

Real-world example: in the Andreuccio story, the protagonist arrives in Naples to buy horses and, in a single night, loses his money, comes close to ending up in a tomb in place of a corpse, and gets pulled into a jewel theft at a church. It’s the kind of picaresque tale, packed with reversals inside just a few hours, that several of the film’s stories are built on.

Pasolini reserves a part for himself, that of Giotto’s pupil, and a dream sequence in that story also features Silvana Mangano, in the role of the Madonna. Filming centers on Casertavecchia, the Church of Santa Chiara and Palazzo Penna, with a few scenes on the Amalfi coast and in castles in Trentino: an Angevin-era Naples rebuilt for the film, far removed from the book’s Florence.

One chapter of the Trilogy of Life

The Decameron is the first film in what Pasolini called the Trilogy of Life, completed by The Canterbury Tales (1972, from Chaucer, Golden Bear in Berlin) and Arabian Nights (1974, from the Arabian tales, Special Jury Prize at Cannes). According to Senses of Cinema, what holds the three films together is a declared thematic thread: the celebration of life’s physicality and carnal nature.

Boccaccio never met Dante in person: his connection to him ran only through texts, including the Divine Comedy, written in those same decades. His direct relationship, built on real meetings, was instead with Francesco Petrarch: in March 1351, Boccaccio travelled to see him in Padua.

From success to recantation: the 1975 Abiura

On 15 June 1975, Pasolini wrote the Abiura della trilogia della vita, a harsh self-critique of the three films that Corriere della Sera published posthumously on 9 November, a week after his death. According to Senses of Cinema, what drove him was his disillusionment at the impossibility of resisting what he called cultural massification: even the sexual explicitness with which he had once defended the films now struck him as absorbed by mass consumer culture, to the point of forcing him to retract his earlier position.