Pampinea Florence: the Black Death
Introduction: the plague · 2% through the novel
I say, then, that the years [of the era] of the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God had attained to the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the notable city of Florence, fair over every other of Italy, there came the death-dealing pestilence, which, through the operation of the heavenly bodies or of our own iniquitous dealings, being sent down upon mankind for our correction by the just wrath of God, had some years before appeared in the parts of the East and after having bereft these latter of an innumerable number of inhabitants, extending without cease from one place to another, had now unhappily spread towards the West.
Boccaccio opens the frame with the plague of 1348 loose in Florence, the fairest of Italian cities, and gives one of the great eyewitness accounts of the Black Death: the plague-boils, the abandoned dead, the collapse of law and kinship. It is the ground the whole book flees from.
explicit Named directly in the text.
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