Facts about The Decameron

1. 06

   Spanning ten days of storytelling, The Decameron draws on sources ranging from ancient fables and Eastern tales to contemporary Florentine gossip and folklore.

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2. 05

   Many tales in The Decameron feature clergy, merchants, and noblewomen as characters who outwit or deceive one another, reflecting the social diversity of medieval Italian society.

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3. 04

   Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in Italian vernacular rather than Latin, helping to establish Tuscan as a prestigious literary language.

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4. 03

   In The Decameron, each of the ten narrators tells one story per day across ten days, producing exactly one hundred tales in total.

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5. 02

   Composed in the 1350s, The Decameron was a major influence on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which adopted its frame-narrative structure.

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6. 01

   Written by Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron frames its hundred tales as stories told by ten young people sheltering from the Black Death in Florence.

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