The Real Story Behind Netflix’s ‘The Decameron’

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

When the 14th-century Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio published The Decameron, a collection of short stories about an outbreak of bubonic plague in Florence, Italy, he spared no detail in his description of the devastating disease.

“In men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg,” Boccaccio wrote. “After a while, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, which showed themselves in many [first] on the arms and about the thighs and [after spread to] every other part of the person, … a very certain token of coming death.”

Despite its graphic imagery, The Decameron is less a chronicle of the medieval pandemic than a humorous, insightful meditation on human nature under dire circumstances. Set in 1348, the text follows ten Florentines who flee to the countryside to escape the Black Death. There, they entertain themselves by telling stories, sharing a total of 100 anecdotes over two weeks. Each member of the group is crowned king or queen for a day and tasked with selecting a topic for that day’s stories, whether it be doomed love affairs, trickery or acts of generosity. Many of the tales borrow from folklore and myth, referencing characters or real-life historical figures who would have been readily recognizable to Boccaccio’s contemporaries.

The Decameron | Official Trailer | Netflix

“The stories, in one way or another, are lifesaving, even as their being entertaining is one of the main ways they can save a life,” wrote novelist Rivka Galchen in a 2020 essay for the New York Times magazine. “Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.”

“The Decameron,” a new series debuting on Netflix on July 25, is loosely based on Boccaccio’s book of the same name. But as showrunner Kathleen Jordan tells the Times, “I think an Italian medievalist will be disappointed if they come to this show expecting to see their favorite Decameron stories depicted.”

While the original text focuses on highborn young men and women, the television show’s chosen ten are a mix of nobles and servants, their interactions exposing the “chasm between the haves and the have-nots,” as more recently underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic, says Jordan in a statement. Some characters, like the crafty leader Pampinea (played by Zosia Mamet) and the charming Panfilo (Karan Gill), are featured storytellers in Boccaccio’s book; others, like Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) and Sirisco (Tony Hale), are minor characters (read: servants) now brought to the spotlight.

Netflix’s adaptation of The Decameron retains the setting and humor of its source material. But the series is interested in dissolving societal norms, while the source material focuses on celebrating “renewal and recreation” in the face of upheaval, according to scholar Frances Di Laura’s 2020 assessment of Boccaccio’s work in the Conversation. Per the Netflix statement, “As time goes on and social rules wear thin, the orgy of riches and liquor collapses into a struggle for survival.” In Reynolds’ words, “It’s like a medieval ‘Love Island,’ and it descends into Lord of the Flies chaos.”

Ahead of the show’s premiere later this week, here’s what you need to know about the 14th-century text that shares its name.

Boccaccio’s The Decameron

Born in 1313, Boccaccio was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Italian merchant and an unknown woman. He grew up in Florence but moved to Naples with his family as a teenager. There, he studied canon law and practiced banking, though neither interested him as much as literature. By the early 1330s, Boccaccio had shifted his focus to writing, producing both prose and poetry. Also in Naples, the burgeoning author met a woman who became his muse, inspiring the fictional Fiammetta, who appears in The Decameron and some of his other works.

Boccaccio returned to Florence in 1340 or 1341, a period of political and economic turmoil for the city. He continued writing, presenting his observations “nobly and illustriously by a display of learning and rhetorical ornament, so as to make his Italian worthy of comparison with the monuments of Latin literature,” per Encyclopedia Britannica. The poet also elevated the ottava rima, a verse form that had been more commonly associated with popular minstrels.

The Black Death arrived in the Italian Peninsula in 1347, carried by Genoese ships returning home from Crimea. The plague quickly spread across the peninsula, striking Florence by 1348. Scholars are divided on whether Boccaccio was present in the city at the time, but he certainly witnessed the aftermath of the disease, which killed his father and stepmother, as well as up to 100,000 other Florentines.

In The Decameron, Boccaccio described the divergent ways in which people coped with the plague, from living “removed from every other and [shutting] themselves up in those houses where none had been sick” to making merry and “drinking without stint or measure” at local taverns. The poet lamented “how many valiant men, how many fair ladies, how many sprightly youths, … breakfasted in the morning with their kinsfolk, comrades and friends, and that same night supped with their ancestors in the other world.”

Boccaccio likely wrote The Decameron between 1348 and 1353. Presented as a frame story in the vein of One Thousand and One Nights, the text boasts “100 stories about knights and ladies, tricksters and reprobates, star-crossed lovers, and randy monks and nuns,” according to the Public Domain Review. During their 14-day stay at a villa in the countryside, the seven women and three men each take a turn at being king or queen for a day. One day of the week is set aside for chores, while another is reserved for marking the Sabbath, leaving ten total days of storytelling. Among the most memorable stories told by the brigata, as the group is known, are a bawdy recounting of the origins of the sexual euphemism “putting the devil in hell” and a story about a trio of young men who pull down the pants of a corrupt Florentine judge as a prank.

Far from inventing all of these anecdotes himself, Boccaccio drew on ancient Greek myths, Indian folklore, local gossip and other sources, weaving together disparate tales to reflect on such overarching themes as fortune, love and chivalry. His account, written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, proved immensely popular, inspiring later authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood.

The Decameron gained new resonance in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced billions of people into isolation. The book “serves as a guide for preserving the mind” under such trying conditions, the Conversation wrote at the time. “Retreating from a stricken city to live a simple life in a communal isolation, the brigata entertain each other and, by following disciplined, structured rituals, recover some of the predictability and certainty that, according to Boccaccio, had been lost.”

Ultimately, Galchen argued in the Times in 2020, the brigata’s decision to return to Florence at the end of the retreat, despite the continued threat posed by the plague, speaks to the power of the stories they shared. The novelle, or news and stories, “of their days away made the novelle of their world, at least briefly, vivid again,” Galchen wrote. “Memento mori—remember that you must die—is a worthy and necessary message for ordinary times, when you might forget. Memento vivere—remember that you must live—is the message of The Decameron.”