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Giovanni boccaccio decameron5/24/2023 This source is a part of the Children during the Black Death teaching module. The English translation is followed by the original in Italian. But most distressing of all, according to Boccaccio, was the collapse of families and the abandonment of children. Some people secluded themselves and restricted their diet, others recklessly gave themselves over to pleasure, and still others tried to behave temperately. Sailko/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Guide to. Government, medical care, and neighborliness broke down. Guide to the Classics: Boccaccio's Decameron, a masterpiece of plague and resilience A scene from the Decameron painted by Carlo Coppede in 1916. Here the author relates in precise detail the gruesome symptoms of the disease and the horrific circumstances that took place in Florence as the epidemic swept through the town disrupting all forms of normal human relations. Though the novella range from the bawdy to the pious, the story telling is light hearted in keeping with the purpose of restorative diversion.īoccaccio's introduction, however, has a very different tone. The epidemic provides the pretext for a group of young men and women to leave Florence and retire to a pleasant villa in the countryside where they entertain themselves by telling stories over 10 days. His report on the behavior of the Florentines after plague entered their city during the spring of 1348 serves as introduction and frame for his collection of 100 tales entitled the Decameron. Giovanni Boccaccio provided the most famous description of what happened during the Black Death in Italy.
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