The Decameron is dirtier than you remember — Storica<br>← Back to blog Cultural Learning May 12, 2026 · 8 min read<br>The Decameron is dirtier than you remember<br>Boccaccio's 1353 book of one hundred stories — told by ten young Florentines fleeing the Black Death — was banned by the Church for centuries. Most readers remember it as foundational Italian literature. What gets dropped from the high-school summary: a quarter of the stories are about people in beds they shouldn't be in, and Boccaccio's deadpan euphemism for what they're doing is the funniest line in fourteenth-century Italian.

Medieval Italian<br>Il Decamerone<br>Boccaccio

Italian Fable<br>Pinocchio<br>Carlo Collodi

In the summer of 1348, the Black Death arrived in the Tuscan port of Pisa and walked north into Florence. By autumn it had killed somewhere between half and two-thirds of the city. Whole streets emptied. Notaries gave up trying to keep up with the wills. The Florentine chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani wrote that there were not enough living to bury the dead, that bodies were stacked in trenches "like cheese between layers of pasta." Giovanni Boccaccio — thirty-five years old, son of a Florentine banker, friend of Petrarch, lover of Latin classics — watched it happen. Five years later he had written a book of one hundred stories framed by that plague. It opens like this:

Dico adunque che già erano gli anni della fruttifera incarnazione del Figliuolo di Dio al numero pervenuti di milletrecentoquarantotto, quando nella egregia città di Fiorenze, oltre a ogn'altra italica bellissima, pervenne la mortifera pestilenza…

I say, then, that the years of the fruitful incarnation of the Son of God had reached the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the noble city of Florence — fairest of any in Italy — the deadly pestilence arrived.

What most readers carry around about the Decameron, if they carry anything beyond the title, is that it is a foundational text of Italian literature, that it has something to do with the plague, and that there are stories nested inside other stories. All true. What gets dropped from the high-school summary: at least a quarter of the hundred stories are about people in beds they shouldn't be in. Wives hide lovers in wine casks. Friars seduce widows in the middle of confession. A naïve teenager in the North African desert learns from a hermit that the most pious thing a young woman can do for God is to "put the devil back in hell" — Boccaccio's deadpan euphemism for what they are very obviously doing. The Counter-Reformation eventually put the Decameron on the Index of Forbidden Books and kept it there for the next three hundred and fifty years. The book is on the Italian shelf at Storica because it is, in fact, the foundation of Italian prose. It is also funnier and filthier than the canon usually advertises.

The frame is a quarantine

Boccaccio sets the action just outside Florence. Ten young Florentines — seven women, three men, all in their late teens and twenties — meet by chance in the church of Santa Maria Novella, decide that the city has become unbearable, and retreat to a country villa in the hills above Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the time they tell stories. Each day one of them is named king or queen for the day, and assigns a theme; the other nine then tell a story on it. They stay fourteen days but only tell stories on ten of them — Fridays and Saturdays are kept for prayer and for the women to wash their hair. Ten storytellers, ten days, ten stories per day. One hundred stories total. The form was new.

The themes grow edgier as the book goes on. Day 1 is free choice. Day 2 is people who come into good fortune after great misery. Day 3 is people who get what they want by cleverness. Day 4 is love stories that end badly; Day 5, love stories that end well. By Day 7 the assigned subject is "tricks wives play on their husbands." Day 8 is "tricks women play on men, men on women, and men on each other." Day 9 is free choice again. Day 10, finally, is tales of magnanimity, as if Boccaccio felt he owed the reader a wash. The Decameron's reputation lives on Days 7, 8, and 9.

The stories are dirty as hell

The most famous of the bawdy ones is the last story of Day 3 — Alibech and Rustico, the hermit. Alibech is fourteen, the daughter of a wealthy man in the North African town of Capsa, and has heard the Christians who live in her father's house say that the surest path to God is to flee into the desert. So she does. She wanders into the Egyptian wilderness alone and asks the first hermit she finds how to serve God. He sends her further on, judging her too pretty to be his problem. She finally reaches a young hermit named Rustico, who agrees to take her in, then spends a sleepless night realising that the most useful service he could ask of her is a very specific physical one. He explains to her, in the morning, that his erection is "the devil," and that her body contains "hell," and that...