Boccaccio attributes the cause of this terrible plague to either malignant celestial influences or divine punishment for the iniquity of Florentine society.Ī scene from Pasolini’s 1971 film The Decameron. The Decameron is a tale of renewal and recreation in defiance of a decimating pandemic. Guide to the Classics: Albert Camus' The Plague Derived from Greek, the word decameron means ten days and is an allusion to Saint Ambrose’s Hexameron, a poetic account of the creation story, Genesis, told over six days. Each of the book’s ten storytellers tells a story a day for ten days. He vividly describes physical, social and psychological sufferings, writing of people dying in the street, rotting corpses, plague boils, swollen glands known as “buboes” – some the size of eggs, others as large as apples – bruises and the blackening skin that foreshadowed death.īoccaccio’s introduction is followed by ten sections containing short stories.
In the introduction to his book, Boccaccio estimates that more than 100,000 people - over half of the city’s inhabitants - died within the walls of Florence between March 1348 and the following July.
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