«O costor non saranno dalla morte vinti o ella gli ucciderà lieti»

Observations on the Decameron’s «Framework»

Abstract

Among the great classics of our literary tradition, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is certainly one of the most exposed to errors of judgment and even serious misinterpretations. Starting from a structural analysis of the text, this article refutes the communis opinio that the book can be reduced to a confused collection of charming stories and finds in the macro-story’s structure – the so-called «framework» – the narrative and ideological center of the work. The story of the life and leisure of the honest band of youth which, in the thick of the 1348 epidemic plague, retreats to the splendid isolation of the countryside, depicts a model of a renewed society: this has moral, political and religious implications and provides a rather challenging response, far from Utopian, to
the crisis of the communal society of the 1300s.