1930. The Decameron is a work of broad-sweeping comic views. It was written by Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian poet and scholar who raised vernacular literature to the status of the classics of antiquity and who prepared for the humanism of the Renaissance. The tales are set in 1348, the year of the Black Death. Florence is a dying, corrupt city, described plainly in all of its horrors. Seven ladies and three gentlemen meet in a church and decide to escape from the charnel house of reality by staying in the hills of Fiesole; there they pass the time telling stories for ten days. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.