The Decameron

Ten young Florentines shut themselves in a country villa to escape the plague of 1348 and tell each other a hundred stories in ten days - merchants, nuns, tricksters and unfaithful wives, told without moralising. Boccaccio had watched the plague take his father and stepmother. The frame is grief; almost everything inside it is comedy. Ninety-seven plates of Venetian squares and river cities by Canaletto and Guardi run alongside the tales, matching the restless, worldly energy of the hundred storytellers.