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. Fifty-five plates of painting, among them Panini and Joli, carry the tale from ancient ruins to the crowded piazzas and pantheon interiors of a later Rome.