Derived from Greek, the word decameron means ten days and is an allusion to Saint Ambrose’s Hexameron, a poetic account of the creation story, Genesis, told over six days. Each of the book’s ten storytellers tells a story a day for ten days.
He vividly describes physical, social and psychological sufferings, writing of people dying in the street, rotting corpses, plague boils, swollen glands known as “buboes” – some the size of eggs, others as large as apples – bruises and the blackening skin that foreshadowed death.īoccaccio’s introduction is followed by ten sections containing short stories.
In the introduction to his book, Boccaccio estimates that more than 100,000 people - over half of the city’s inhabitants - died within the walls of Florence between March 1348 and the following July.
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