The Decameron

Ten Florentines flee the plague and tell a hundred tales in ten days: the comedy of medieval life.

Specifications & Metrics

author

Giovanni Boccaccio

type

Frame narrative / novella collection

era

Italian Trecento (1349–1353)

language

Tuscan Italian

setting

A villa outside plague-struck Florence

parts

10 days

Relative Scale in Novels

Core Principles & Analysis

• Written 1349–53, in the shadow of the Black Death it opens with.
• Ten narrators tell ten tales a day for ten days — a hundred in all.
• Its vernacular prose founded Italian fiction.

Sources

• Wikipedia: The Decameron