The “Black Death”

Boccaccio was in Florence in 1348, the year it was ravaged by the “Black Death”. With this term (or “Great Death” or “Black Pestilence” in Italy) we normally refer to the epidemic that hit Europe between 1347 and 1352, killing off at least a third of the population (25-30 million dead out of a population of 75-80 million). Giovanni lost friends like Matteo Frescobaldi, Giovanni Villani and Franceschino degli Albizzi. Painful losses also hit his family, with the death of his father and stepmother, following which Boccaccio inherited the whole of his father’s wealth  and took over its management together with responsibility for his brother, who was not yet of age.

This historic event had a tragic effect and was a turning point in Boccaccio’s life, as it forced him to take on full responsibility for his family. The 1348 plague is mentioned in the initial pages of the Decameron: I, Introduction[1]. L’“orrido cominciamento/horrid commencement” became the motor force capable of setting off the telling of the tale, that encompasses the hundred stories of the book. The story is about ten youths, seven women and three men, who met in the Church of Santa Maria Novella whilst the plague was raging, and who decided to leave Florence in order to wait for the passing of the epidemic in the country, where they passed the time in games, dancing and storytelling. The contour of death that surrounds the Decameron leaves ample scope for the nefarious description of this terrible plight at a social and moral level. The common denominator to the atrocities illustrated by Boccaccio, with the rigor of the chronicler an the participation of the eyewitness,  is indicated in the infringement of the natural and social laws. Florence, afflicted by this epidemic, experienced a degradation of men who, for fear of contagion, wouldn’t even succour their closest relatives, children included. With this rupture in family values came the upturn of moral and religious order, with the desecration of the cult of the dead and a turn toward dissolute behaviour.

---

[1]Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. I, pp. 13-48.