Tales from the Decameron

It is 1348 in Florence, and the Black Death is transforming the city into a place of horror. Ten young people — seven women and three men — escape to a villa in the hills and agree to pass the time by telling each other stories. Over ten days they tell one hundred tales: bawdy and tragic, romantic and satirical, touching and wickedly funny, drawn from every level of society and every corner of the medieval imagination.

This Penguin Classics selection gathers the finest of Boccaccio’s stories and presents them in a translation that preserves their warmth, their wit, and their surprising modernity. These are not pious medieval tales: they celebrate pleasure, intelligence, quick thinking, and human desire with a frankness that anticipates the Renaissance by a century. Priests are hypocrites, merchants are clever, and clever women regularly outmanoeuvre the men who underestimate them.

Boccaccio influenced Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats. His narrative skill is extraordinary: each story is precisely paced, psychologically acute, and resolved with a satisfying inevitability. One of literature’s great treasury boxes — essential world fiction. Published by Penguin Classics.