The compositional chronology of the Decameron and the way the work was divulged are still today somewhat uncertain. If a certain post quem point of reference is the Black Death, which struck Florence in 1348 and is echoed in the cornice, more complex is fixing an ante quem that could give a date to when the text was finished. According to Leonardo Salviati the work was ended already in 1353, date which Vittore Branca instead brought forward to 1351[1].

It would however not be right to mark with an exact year the end to a process of elaboration that manuscripts show as having perennially been in fieri or in process. The 1370 manuscript, from the Hamilton 90 code, which gives us the author’s last ideas, is full of variants, annotated in the margins or between lines, to show how Boccaccio continued to correct and rewrite this work all his life. The above mentioned dates shed no light on when the work was begun either, when, in other words, Boccaccio began to write novellas for the Decameron. We thus do not know if any of the units, in theory ascribable to the Neapolitan period, were then added to the sylloge later, as was believed by Benedetto Croce[2]. The main body of the work was however in all likelihood written during his period in Florence[3].

In the introduction to day IV (IV: Introduzione, 5-7[4]) there is a famous recrimination against detractors. Without excluding that this might be an excusatio non petita, aimed at pre-empting some foreseeable criticisms, this document would lead us to suppose that the Decameron was put together somewhat piecemeal. It is impossible however to ascertain whether this was true for blocks of novellas or single days.

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[1]L. Salviati, Degli auuertimenti della lingua sopra'l «Decamerone» volume primo del caulier Lionardo Saluiati diuiso in tre libri: ... Ne' quali si discorre partitamente dell'opere, e del pregio di forse cento prosatori del miglior tempo, che non sono in istampa, de' cui esempli, quasi infiniti, e pieno il volume ..., In Venice (In Venice, at Domenico, & Gio. Battista Guerra, fratelli, 1584); V. Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. II, Rome, 1991, pp. 147-162.

[2]B. Croce, La novella di Andreauccio da Perugia, in Id., Storie e leggende napoletane, Bari 1923, pp. 45-84.

[3]L. Battaglia Ricci, Boccaccio, Rome 2000, p. 124.

[4]Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, a c. di V. Branca, Torino 1999, vol. I, pp. 460-461

Decameron, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, ms. Hamilton 90, c. 71v. Boccaccio visualizzato: narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, a c. di V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. II, p. 64.