It is 1348, the year of the Black Death. In the dying, corrupt city of Florence, seven ladies and three gentlemen decide to escape to the hills of Fiesole, where they pass ten days telling each other stories. Reveling in an enchanted dreamworld of beauty and luxury, they take turns playing king or queen for the day, with the designated ruler naming the stipulations for that day's story. In contrast to their idyllic environment of medieval gentilesse, the stories they tell are marked by an intense, cynical realism and feature ordinary people of less privileged classes.

Boccaccio brings these stories alive with the authentic language of the different social classes and a frank, realistic handling of character. His satire often bites deep, yet he embraces evil and holiness alike with sympathy and tolerance, leaving guilty characters to condemn themselves.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Italian writer, most probably born in Tuscany, was the illegitimate son of a merchant of Certaldo, who launched him on a commercial career, during which he spent some time in Paris. But the young Giovanni abandoned commerce and the study of canon law. At Naples he gave himself to story writing in verse and prose, mingled in courtly society, and fell in love with the noble lady whom he made famous under the name of Fiammetta. Boccaccio lived alternately at Florence and Naples, producing prose tales, pastorals, and poems until 1350. After that time, he became a diplomat entrusted with important public affairs, and a scholar devoted to the cause of the new learning. During this period, in which he formed a lasting friendship with Petrarch, Boccaccio, as Florentine ambassador, visited Rome, Ravenna, Avignon, and Brandenburg. In 1358 he completed his greatest work, the Decameron, begun some ten years before. Boccaccio for some time held a chair founded for the elucidation of the works of Dante, on whose Divina Commedia he produced a commentary. During his last years he lived principally in retirement at Certaldo, and would have entered into holy orders, moved by repentance for the follies of his youth, had he not been dissuaded by Petrarch. He died at Certaldo in December 1375. The Decameron has had a lasting influence on European literature; Chacer borrowed largely from it, as did Shakespeare to a lesser degree. Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Swinburne, and George Eliot are among those who have turned for their subjects to the Decameron. In this work, the two great tendencies which run through European literature—the classical and the romantic—are seen working together as they are hardly to be seen elsewhere.