The ten days

Decameron

III. Human industry

After the Saturday and Sunday pause, days dedicated to rest and personal hygiene, the brigade again commences its tales under the regency of Neifile. The theme proposed is that of human industry, value that, in the sequence of the days of the Decameron, comes after Fortune. It is somewhat as if Boccaccio were proceeding towards a progressive focus on human potential, first subtracted from the influence of supernatural and religious design, in the second day, and then the vagaries of Fortune.

Having abandoned the first villa, the ten youths end up in a noble palace upon a hillside. The garden of this luxurious home is protected by a wall and is full of fruit bearing plants, with vine pergolas that mark with their colours and scents the walks. At the centre of the garden there is a lawn of “minutissima erba” or finest grass, full of flowers and surrounded by citrus trees; at the centre of the lawn a marble fountain sends up enough water to feed two mills down the valley. This note on hydraulic engineering, set within a highly idealised and stylised literary topos, is a strong element of rupture with tradition and at the same time is an indication of the close relation between the framework and the novellas of that day, entirely centred upon the exaltation of human industry.

The single tales also all have the same theme in common. In eight cases out of ten (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) the plot is based on the classical amorous triangle and the heart of the tale is how the lover manages to excogitate how to overcome the obstacle of the husband. An ecclesiastical setting acts as a backcloth to the to Masetto da Lamporecchio’s novella (1) and, if in the third novella a friar unwittingly takes on the role of para-nymph, for as many as three times it is a man of religion who benefits from the stratagem with which to covet the women (4, 8, 10).