Safely in the countryside, they do not ruminate on the conditions of the plague. After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata-the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales-escapes ravaged Florence. Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work. Commentators have astutely recognized the similarities between Giovanni Boccaccio’s description of plague-stricken Italy and our new normal as COVID-19 wreaks havoc across the globe. The fourteenth-century Italian masterpiece is “on Everyone’s Coronavirus Reading List” and “shows us how to survive coronavirus.” Decameron-inspired book clubs and collections of Coronavirus tales are popping up all over the Internet.
This is part of a series on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
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