"How many valiant men, how many beautiful ladies, how many gracious youngsters (...) dined in the morning with their parents, companions and friends, and in the evening supper in the other world with their dead." In 1348, it was not the coronavirus, but the plague, "just effect of the wrath of God" , which ravaged Europe. In the first pages of the Décaméron , Giovanni Boccace (1313-1375) gives a chilling and clinical description of the scourge in Florence whose institutions are collapsing.
Read also: When the Black Death overturned the West
One day, after mass, seven young ladies, still spared from evil, decide to forget "the shadow of the dead" and to flee this hell on earth to take refuge in the countryside. But they cannot imagine leaving without men. As one of them put it: "Certainly, men are the heads of women and, if they do not put things right by themselves, our businesses are unlikely to have a commendable end." That's good, three young men of their acquaintance show up in the church. Believer
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