A studied alchemy links the constitutional elements of the  Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. The book contains one hundred novellas, told in ten days by ten different storytellers, three men and seven women. Each individual tale is set within a main story that acts as a cornice or framework, centred round the happy brigade of storytellers, which begins when they meet in Santa Maria Novella, to when they decide to abandon Florence, afflicted by plague, so as to find safety in the countryside.

To this narrative invention, defined a framework or, more technically, a macro text, is entrusted the basic structural purpose of acting as a bonding factor for the novellas. The description of the life of the  micro society that is the brigade, which differs in the rules adopted and its organisation as compared to tradition, aims to purvey an eschatological  and palingenetic message, which gives the reader an omni-comprehensive key with which to read the Decameron. Each day has its precise ritual, which ends with the singing of a ballad, for a total of ten sung components, which connotes the sylloge as prosimetre. Title, prologue, introduction to the IV day and the author’s conclusions are the depositories of information on the whys and wherefores behind the text, from the aims of the work to the type of public it was addressed to, and they constitute a rich section defined as  paratextual.

The carefully done page layout of the handwritten Hamilton 90 code, drawn up by Boccaccio, by then elderly, around 1370, highlights the internal structure of the Centonovelle. Decorative considerations, as with the recourse to rubrics and coloured initial letters, go to compose a whole in a coherent graphic paratext, which succeeds in enucleating days, novellas, ballads and single paragraphs of the prose of the Decameron. These expedients of a formal nature reveal themselves to be also there to suggest the method of fruition the most congenial for the actualisation or performance of the text, of considerable effect on the global interpretation of the work.

Decameron, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, ms. Hamilton 90, c. 79v. Boccaccio visualized: narration in words and images between medieval times and the renaissance, edited by V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. II, p. 64.