Boccaccio and the Decameron: a hundred tales of love and its faces

In the spring of 1348, while the plague ravages Florence, seven young women and three young men meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella and decide to withdraw to the countryside. To pass the time, each of them tells a story every day. In this way Giovanni Boccaccio, in the Decameron, probably composed between 1349 and 1353, builds a frame containing a hundred tales, many of them devoted to love.

A book for women in love

The preface states its addressees at once. Boccaccio writes for women in love, who unlike men cannot distract themselves with hunting, trade or travel, and remain shut up at home with their thoughts. The author relates that he suffered for love and was comforted by the conversation of friends: now he wishes to return that comfort. The preface opens with the words «Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti», it is a human thing to have compassion for the afflicted.

The book also bears a telling subtitle, Prencipe Galeotto, which recalls the line in the fifth canto of the Inferno where Francesca blames the romance of Lancelot for leading her into sin. Boccaccio, a great admirer and popularizer of Dante, knowingly accepts the role of the book as a go-between for the readers' feelings, but makes it an instrument of pleasure and intelligence.

The fourth day: unhappy loves

The king of the fourth day, Filostrato, sets as its theme loves that came to an unhappy end. It is the darkest day of the book. Here we read the story of Ghismonda, daughter of Tancredi, prince of Salerno, who receives from her father, in a golden cup, the heart of her murdered lover and, after bathing it with tears, takes her own life; and that of Lisabetta of Messina, who hides her beloved's head in a pot of basil.

In these tales love clashes with social hierarchies, with the authority of fathers and brothers, with the economic interests of families. Ghismonda defends before Tancredi her right to love a man of humble station, arguing that nobility springs from virtue and not from blood: a thesis showing how thoroughly Boccaccio had absorbed the lesson of the stilnovisti.

The fifth day: happy endings after misfortune

The following day, led by Fiammetta, tells instead of loves that reach happiness after hard trials. The most famous tale is that of Federigo degli Alberighi, a Florentine nobleman who squanders all his wealth on a lady who does not return his love and, reduced to poverty, serves her at dinner the only possession he has left, his falcon. The gesture, discovered too late, ends by winning the lady's heart.

The same day contains the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, set in the pine forest of Classe near Ravenna, where the young man witnesses the infernal hunt of a knight pursuing the woman who had rejected him. In 1483 Sandro Botticelli drew from it a series of four painted panels made for a wedding, a sign of the vast fortune of the tales in the visual arts.

Before the Decameron, Boccaccio had devoted to love works such as the Filostrato, on the story of Troiolo and Criseida, which inspired Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, the lament of an abandoned woman. In his masterpiece, however, love becomes a natural force that moves people in every direction, tragic, comic or generous, and that literature can at last narrate in prose.