The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio : complete and unexpurgated
by Richard Aldington, Rockwell Kent
Why You'll Love This
Seven hundred years ago, ten people fled a plague and told each other stories — and those stories are still filthier, funnier, and more human than most modern fiction.
- Great if you want: bawdy wit, sharp social satire, and medieval humanity at full volume
- The experience: episodic and varied — darkly comic one tale, genuinely tragic the next
- The writing: Aldington's translation keeps Boccaccio's rhythm: sly, ornate, and pleasurably unhurried
- Skip if: you prefer narrative momentum — 100 standalone tales resist binge-reading
About This Book
Ten strangers retreat to a Florentine villa as the Black Death ravages the city around them, and to pass the days they tell each other stories—one hundred of them, across ten days. What emerges is not an escape from the horror outside the walls but something far more vivid: a portrait of human nature in all its cunning, desire, folly, and occasional grace. Boccaccio's characters seduce, scheme, grieve, and triumph with an urgency that feels startlingly modern, and the framing device of plague lends every tale an undercurrent of urgency—pleasure seized against a backdrop of mortality.
Richard Aldington's translation renders Boccaccio's fourteenth-century Italian into prose that is both faithful and genuinely pleasurable to read, preserving the wit and rhythm of the original without the stiffness that can hobble older translations. The complete, unexpurgated text means readers encounter Boccaccio's frankness about sex, class, and the clergy exactly as intended—unfiltered and often wickedly funny. Rockwell Kent's illustrations add visual texture to the reading experience, and the book's elegant structure, building day by day toward a cumulative humanity, rewards patient readers who let the full hundred tales wash over them.