Boccaccio is also presenting through these stories the way of life and attitudes of his characters, that is the well-to-do of Florence. This happens over ten days and so the work contains 100 tales, which cover everything from commerce to adultery. At the end of each day's tales, there is a climactic canzone or song. The king or queen also decides the theme of the ten, often comic stories each member must tell all the others. Each member of the group is allowed to become king or queen for a day and dictate how the others will spend their leisure time that day. The group of characters in the Decameron, made up of seven women and three men, travel to the safety of a secluded villa in the Tuscan town of Fiesole. Neither a doctor's advice nor the strength of medicine could do anything to cure this illness…So many corpses would arrive in front of a church every day and at every hour that the amount of holy ground for burials was certainly insufficient for the ancient custom of giving each body its individual place. And just as the gavoccioli were originally, and still are, a very definite indication of impending death, in like manner these spots came to mean the same thing for whoever contracted them. And from the two parts of the body already mentioned, in very little time, the said deadly gavoccioli began to spread indiscriminately over every part of the body then, after this, the symptoms of the illness changed to black or livid spots appearing on the arms and thighs, and on every part of the body – sometimes there were large ones and other times a number of little ones scattered all around. It is also one of the world's great literary masterpieces.Showed its first signs in men and women alike by means of swellings either in the groin or under the armpits, some of which grew to the size of an ordinary apple and others to the size of an egg (more or less), and the people called them gavoccioli (buboes). This is Boccaccio's masterpiece and is generally viewed as the work that confirmed his reputation as the founder of Italian prose literature.

The work’s fundamental purpose is one of ethical instruction through the means of beautiful and entertaining prose, touching on themes of morality, fortune, human will, wit, virtue, female agency, and love won and lost.

Presented within the sophisticated structure of a surrounding frame story, the one hundred allegorical tales are shared through the voices of these people as they spend their nights regaling the company with tales intended to guide and comfort, from the erotic, sensual, and bawdy to the intellectual, philosophical and tragic. Written in the fourteenth century by Italian author, poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio, the Decameron contains stories told by ten young Florentines who have fled the city to escape the Plague. Beautiful collector's edition of the famous Decameron: one hundred fables and fairy tales with the universal wisdom of great literature.

Decamerone giovanni boccaccio