Boccaccio’s Modern Life: What The Decameron Reveals About Contemporary Anxiety

I imagine the ideal way in which to read Giovanni Boccaccio’s profane and earthy 14th-century classic The Decameron is to be ensconced for a sweltering summer at the Villa Schifanoia. There you would have a small but elegant room overlooking the Tuscan hillsides whose winding roads are lined with those tall and preposterously skinny trees, while evenings would be given over to feasts in the yellow-walled courtyard where you dine on cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto cut to a near-translucent pinkness, pappardelle with fresh pesto studded with garlic and pine-nuts, and a thick cut of charred and marbled ribeye whose interior is as luridly crimson as a muscular human heart.

All of this, obviously, is to be whetted with thimblefuls of grappa and multiple fiascos of chianti. “Much have I eaten, much have I drank, and much have I mocked mankind”—that’s not Boccaccio, it’s the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos some two millennia before The Decameron, but their worldviews are identical.

Boccaccio’s is that Mediterranean disposition which despite some unfortunate contraries (Savonarola, Campanella, etc.) tends to eschew millenarianism and utopianism in favor of the tangible and material, where one should be content to tend to one’s own vineyard. What the author expresses, argues Massimo Riva in his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, is the subversive “erotic charge of popular Mediterranean culture,” of the richness in the “Florentine vernacular world” which extends into the “Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Pugliese dialect.”

The Decameron, with its simultaneously grim and sexy framing tale of seven noblewomen and three noblemen seeking refuge in a Tuscan villa during the Black Death while they recount a hundred tales to one another, remains a masterpiece of the humanistic ethos, a startling expression of fatalistic modernity for Boccaccio’s characters (and readers) facing the apocalypse.

While the bells of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore rang out for the dead in the city during a pandemic that took 75 percent of the Republic’s citizens, Boccaccio’s youths were content to drink, and eat, and fuck, and most of all to tell stories in the bucolic countryside. “Fate quello che noi diciamo e non quello che noi faciamo”—“Do as we say, not as we do.” No wonder it’s always been popular, why it’s even more relevant today.

Panfilo, Neifile, Filomena, Dioneo, Fiammetta, Emilia, Filostrato, Lauretta, Elissa, and Pampinea sup and sip while their fellow countrymen and women die by the thousands, the stories which they tell each other a bulwark of meaning against the horrors occurring outside. Scholars have long argued over the allegorical significance of each character—it seems clear that they each represent this or that virtue, some ethical concept—but the ten are also recognizably human, rendered with an acute awareness of psychology and a recognizable interiority.

The Decameron’s conceit is that each character will tell a single story every day across ten days, most of which are drawn from various compendiums of myth and folklore, mostly classical but ranging as far as Arabic and Indian sources, while being broadly anticlerical and humanistic in a manner that is obviously of the Italian Renaissance. The assembled ten recount the adventures of Messer Grimaldi of Genoa and his jester, of the Sultan Saladin and the wise Jewish courtier Melchizedek; stories ranges from the Prince of Salerno’s murdering his daughters lover to the recluse Alibech learning how to battle the devil, of Gianni Lotteringhi who hears a werewolf skulking outside his midnight door and of the wool spinner Peronella who with quick thinking tricks her cuckolded husband by having her lover hide in a barrel and claiming that he was the man who’d purchased it (though this is a rather chaste synopsis).

Within Boccaccio’s frame tale, the hundred stories range from the erotic to the tragic, the hilarious to the introspective, an author simultaneously scholarly and proletarian, divine and ribald. This is a book that sings in a polyvocal choir of voices, styles, and negative capability that makes The Decameron evocative of the novel some three centuries before Cervantes supposedly invented the form. “Nothing is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it,” argued Boccaccio, and indeed he is an author who doesn’t just describe indiscretions sweetly, but who far more importantly sees his characters as deserving empathy, the writer who values people, who centers the human within humanism.

Because of that quality, Boccaccio’s influence is seen in Shakespeare to Shelly, Keats to Goethe. His great reader Geoffrey Chaucer in his The Canterbury Tales, whose narrative structure seems at least partially modeled upon The Decameron, arguably invests the characters within its frame with even more human verisimilitude, and yet Boccaccio’s work is a triumph of vernacular prose (as opposed to verse) that makes it unmistakably modern, the primogeniture to the novel with all of its befuddling complexities and sublime contradictions. The Florentine is our contemporary, not only in terms of his work’s structure, but in its perspective, his philosophy that “Heaven would indeed be heaven if lovers were permitted as much enjoyment as they had experienced on earth,” a lusty clarion call for the indispensability of the here and the now.

There is a bit of the reality show about The Decameron, with Boccaccio understanding the narrative truism that a bunch of young, hot people confined to a closed space has obvious dramatic potential. Certainly, the producers of the new Netflix adaptation lean heavily into the Bacchanalian in the source material, the teaser trailer for the series making use of New Order’s 1983 synthpop, eurodisco classic “Blue Monday,” the choreography of the dancing, writhing, drinking young Florentines in rhythm to the propulsive syncopation of the drum machine (the track appears again at the end of the first episode). More associated with neon dayglow freaks raging on MDMA in an ‘80s Madchester warehouse than Vino Nobile di Montepulciano quaffed on the Ponte Vecchio, “Blue Monday” nonetheless captures some of the vitality, the wantonness, the licentiousness, the tempus fugit of the whole Boccaccio-thing.

Producer Kathleen Jordan’s Decameron is in keeping with the trend of updating canonical source material into cheekily rendered scenes outfitted in contemporary dance music, from Sofia Coppola’s 2006 New Wave Marie Antoinette to the Apple TV+ Dickinson wherein the Bard of Amherst is transformed into a bisexual, club-hopping it-girl. Netflix’s adaptation feels a bit like White Lotus meets The Princess Bride, with just a pinch of Bridgerton and My Lady Jane thrown in.

In Jordan’s adaptation, Pampinea comes across as a screen-addled Instagram influencer, Dineo as a quack doctor hustling his patients, and an invented character named Tindaro is a mansplaining incel. Obliquely a parable about COVID lockdown (we’re all still processing…), this version of the classic is funny, but a bit of a missed opportunity as Jordan eliminates the storytelling that gave the original its jouissance.

The Italian New Wave director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s gritty 1971 adaptation, conveyed in his characteristic mélange of sensual Catholicism and materialist Marxism, is far more truthful to Boccaccio’s gospel concerning life lived amidst Armageddon. Most importantly, this self-described “Catholic Marxist” understood the power of stories. To eliminate the tales of The Decameron is to no longer have The Decameron. Both radical and mystical, Pasolini doesn’t reject the superstructure for the base. There is no throwing away the roses for your bread, because the filmmaker understands that the human body—and soul—need both.

“If you shout long live freedom without laughter,” writes Pasolini in a poem from La rabbia/Anger translated by Cristina Viti, “you’re not shouting long live freedom. / If you shout long live freedom without love, / you’re not shouting long live freedom.” Pasolini is of Emma Goldman’s party, and he knows it, both radicals understanding that a revolution without dancing isn’t worth having. To that cosmopolitan understanding, Boccaccio should be a secular saint, for as his characters live amidst inequity and plague—as today we live amidst encroaching authoritarianism and pandemic—they forge meaning through narrative, through the very human impulse to simply tell a story and to tell it well.

A bit of the dissolute clings to Boccaccio’s reputation, for more than anything, he is the great enthusiast of the human in all that’s multitudinous about us. An author who, along with his confidant and mentor Petrarch, was writing the Renaissance while Europe was still living in the Middle Ages. The critic Erich Auerbach brilliantly, but counterintuitively, argued in his 1929 Dante: The Poet of the Secular World that the author of The Divine Comedy was the primogeniture of modernity, but it’s much easier to say that Boccaccio was such. Except that Boccaccio’s world view is more perennial than simply contemporary, the desire to not just survive but thrive during calamity while acknowledging the looming asteroid upon the horizon, a rational approach in evidence from Ecclesiastes and Lucretius to Pasolini.

Conservative critics, who are constitutionally allergic to anything that implies fun, may reject the ahistoricism of some adaptations as disrespectful to the originals, but The Decameron was never intended to be sacrosanct. Florence already had Dante; what Boccaccio offered was something different, not heaven and hell but an Epicurean manual for how to live after heaven had been abolished and hell had commandeered earth.

The plague is the through-line of The Decameron, the blackened buboes and putrid pustules of those whose corpses were filling up the streets of Florence the reason why these aristocrats have chosen to escape, their fear of “dying more like animals than humans,” as Boccaccio put it. The Black Death, when it was said that a person could have breakfast with their descendants and dinner with their ancestors, ravaged Europe, killing perhaps a third of the continent (and much more in some places) between 1346 and 1353. Rather than succumbing to the horrors of the bubonic plague, Boccaccio’s beautiful young things luxuriate in their own sensuality, in food and stories. There is a bit of satire about them, but also envy, as well as empathy. Who, if given the choice, wouldn’t take the option chosen by Panfilo and Lauretta, Filomena and Filostrata?

Boccaccio is a writer for love in the time of COVID and sex in the Anthropocene, of the good life during Armageddon and eating, drinking and being merry while the sea level rises. The court poet of carpe diem. Dante is stately and cosmic, but his avid reader Boccaccio lives not in heaven and hell but on earth like the rest of us. Boccaccio’s is simply a comedy that is human rather than divine, which has made all the difference.