The Decameron

"In the midnight hour, in the Renaissance..." — during the plague of 1348 — young people (seven girls and three boys) decide to take refuge from the plague in a country Villa near Florence. Within ten days, each of them tells one story a day. The collection of these witty and playful or profound philosophical, frankly erotic or moralistic stories, anecdotes and morals and amounted to "the Decameron" (i.e. "desyatidnevki"). Wrote this wonderful work, which became a literary gem of the Early Renaissance, Giovanni Boccaccio, an outstanding humanist, scientist, scholar, poet and writer, one of the most educated men of his time.