List $76.95

Written by Giovanni Boccaccio - Audio book performed by Frederick Davidson - Unabridged Fiction - 11 CASSETTES - 16.5 hours

Publisher, Blackstone Audio

Part 1 of 2

Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch were the leading lights in a century that is considered the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. The Decameron, or Ten Days’ Entertainment, is his most famous work, a collection of stories considered representative of the Middle Ages, as well as a product of the Renaissance. The work is both, as it not only encompasses literary legacies of the medieval world but also goes far beyond Boccaccio’s own time, transcending in tone and style artistic works of previous as well as later periods.

This collection of tales is set in 1348, the year of the Black Death. Florence is a dying, corrupt city, described plainly in all of its horrors. Seven ladies and three gentlemen meet in a church and decide to escape from the charnel house of reality by staying in the hills of Fiesole; there they pass the time telling stories for ten days.

They set up a working arrangement whereby each would be king or queen for a day; each day the ruler commanded a story be told following certain stipulations. Their existence is that of the enchanted medieval dreamworld: a paradise of flowers, ever-flowing fountains, shade trees, soft breezes, where all luxuries of food and drink abound. Virtue reigns along with medieval gentilesse in its finest sense.