Florence · 1353 · quotedThe Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
The frame of the hundred tales, set in and just outside Florence in the plague year of 1348. The death-dealing pestilence empties the city; seven young ladies meet by chance in the church of Santa Maria Novella and resolve to flee; with three young men they retire two short miles into the hills toward Fiesole, to a villa traditionally identified with Poggio Gherardo; from there they wander to the secluded Valley of the Ladies; and at the end the company returns to Santa Maria Novella, whence it set out. The hundred tales roam all of Europe, but the setting the map fixes is this Florentine frame, the ground of the greatest book of the Italian Middle Ages.
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