A review by dllh
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

4.0

This was a delight. I learned a little bit about medieval Italy and the plague (apparently the worst in European history) that wrecked the population and I had lots of laughs. The story here is that seven women and three men left disease-ravaged Florence to distract themselves in the nearby countryside by singing, dancing, and telling stories. Each in the company tells a story each day for ten days. More often than not, the stories stick to a common theme for the day, and more often than not, they're at least a little bawdy.

Boccaccio's book (and his sources) served as source material for some of the stories most of us read from Chaucer, and his book makes me want to go back and reread The Canterbury Tales. It's a pretty long read (in this edition, about 800 pages plus about 140 pages of introductory matter and a bunch of end notes), and though I enjoyed it and didn't ever quite get bogged down, I imagine that many would find it tedious in spite of the belly laughs it so often inspires. It's definitely one I'll dip into from time to time in the future (I dog-eared the best of the dirty jokes).