The plague haunts our imagination as an indelible memory. Yet few of us have any experience of it, even as epidemiologists have noted an uptick in the number of cases in the last few decades to around ...

Frances Di Lauro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

Written by Giovanni Boccaccio in the 1350s, this collection of stories deals with sexuality in a way that can still make readers blush – and it has now inspired a Netflix comedy. Quiz question: which ...

THE love which Dante so magisterially celebrated and to which Boccaccio was paying his faltering tribute in the Ameto was the mother, not of religion, but of culture. Christianity had turned the ...

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be reading Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a novel published more than 600 years ago. Oddly, given my lust for fiction, I had never read The Decameron, probably ...

The deadly plague arrived in the noble city of Florence, Italy. It had begun in the East, where it deprived countless beings of their lives before it headed for the West, spreading ever greater misery ...

UPON the outskirts of the city of Naples lies the tomb of Virgil. The body of the great poet was laid there nineteen years before the beginning of the Christian Era, and during all the tumultuous ...

Ten young people decide to quarantine outside Florence. It’s 1348, in the time of the bubonic plague. The afflicted develop lumps in their groins or armpits, then dark spots on their limbs. Some ...

Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (V.1786-92) [2] [5] For notice of this reference, see the brief mention in the note to vv. 1789-92 in the Riverside Chaucer, C.D. Benson’s edition of F.N.

NORWALK — The Rev. Michael Boccaccio does not believe in reincarnation. He is Catholic after all. But if, by some chance, he does come back in another life, he wants to be a seagull. “I love flying, I ...