Decameron

Terry Jones introduces ten dramatisations of choice Florentine Fancies, adapted from Giovanni Boccaccio's classic human comedy by the BBCMonty Python star and medieval historian Terry Jones presents ten BBC Radio dramatisations of tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece.Composed in the early 1350s, in the wake of the Black Death, The Decameron comprises 100 short stories from all over the world, reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes of Renaissance Italy. Their universal themes - love, sex, religion, fate, morality - resonate with us to this day, and their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern. Beautifully realised in vivid, vernacular prose, they have become a bedrock of our storytelling tradition, mined ever since by authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Keats, Molière and Thomas Mann.The scene is the onset of the Black Death, Italy and a group of seven young women and three young men escape to the countryside to shelter in a seclu