Italy is both the point of departure and a shifting stage in the Decameron: the plague empties Florence and gives the storytelling company its reason to gather, while later tales place political upheaval, enslavement, and return across Italian islands and cities. Its geography is not merely scenic. Florence’s losses frame the book’s turn toward stories, and the fortunes of people in Sicily, Lipari, Genoa, and Venice show how local lives are exposed to forces that carry them far beyond home.

Florence and the plague

In 1348, a pestilence that had spread westward from the East reached Florence, described as a notable city and the fairest in Italy. The account entertains celestial influence and divine correction as explanations for the disease, but emphasizes that human measures could not contain it. The city had appointed officers to purge impurities, barred sick people from entering, and received repeated health advice; devout people also made supplications and processions. As spring arrived, the sickness nevertheless began to display its effects.

The symptoms make the crisis bodily and unmistakable. Swellings appeared in the groin or beneath the armpits, sometimes growing as large as an apple or an egg. Later, black or livid blotches spread over the arms, thighs, and other parts of the body. Both the swellings and the blotches were treated as certain signs of approaching death. The progression from visible mark to anticipated death gives the epidemic an oppressive clarity: the disease announces its outcome on the body.

Between March and July, more than one hundred thousand people were believed to have died within Florence’s walls. The scale of the loss becomes visible in abandoned houses and palaces, families without heirs, and the sudden reversal of ordinary time: people who had breakfasted among kin and friends could be dead by supper. Florence is nearly emptied of inhabitants before the narrative turns away from this devastation. On a Tuesday morning, seven young women meet at Santa Maria Novella after hearing divine service in mourning clothes. The gathering makes the city’s calamity the immediate circumstance from which the book’s storytelling begins.

Political upheaval in Sicily

The stories also locate Italy within struggles over rule and allegiance. After the death of Frederick II, Manfred was crowned King of Sicily, and Arrighetto Capece, a Neapolitan nobleman, held the governance of the island. When Charles I defeated and killed Manfred at Benevento, Sicily passed into a changed political order. Arrighetto, unwilling to become subject to his lord’s enemy, prepared to flee; once the Sicilians discovered his intention, he and other supporters of Manfred were taken prisoner and delivered to Charles along with possession of the island.

This reversal displaces Arrighetto’s wife, Madam Beritola Caracciola, and their children. Poor and pregnant, she flees by boat with her elder son, Giusfredi, toward Lipari, where she gives birth to Scacciato. She then tries to continue to her kin in Naples, but contrary winds carry the ship to Ponza. The sequence links the political change in Sicily to a family’s forced movement through nearby islands: the loss of power becomes separation, uncertainty, and flight.

Islands, ports, and forced movement

The family’s journey does not end at Ponza. Corsairs seize the ship while leaving Madam Beritola unseen; in Genoa, the nurse and the two children become part of the booty distributed among the galley’s owners. Messer Guasparrino d’Oria sends them to his household to serve as slaves. To protect the children, the nurse conceals their identity, tells others they are her sons, and gives Giusfredi the name Giannotto di Procida. In this episode, Italian places mark successive changes in status: a route toward relatives becomes a forced landing, and a household arrival becomes enslavement and concealment.

Other journeys make the Italian islands a point of departure as well as a place of return. Costanza, believing Martuccio Gomito dead, sets out alone in a boat and is carried by the wind to Susa. She later finds him alive in Tunis, where his standing with the king has improved through his counsel. They marry and return wealthy to Lipari. Her route carries the story away from Italy before bringing it back to the island, turning Lipari into the destination of a reunion after separation and danger.

The Italian city as public stage

Italy’s cities also host encounters in which private wrongdoing becomes public spectacle. In Venice, a crowd gathers at the Rialto to see what has been announced as a hunt. Once the crowd is assembled, the supposed spectacle is revealed as the exposure of a cleric who had been disguised as a wild man. The audience recognizes him, reviles him, and pelts him with filth; members of his religious community eventually take him away to the convent, where he is believed to have died in prison. The scene makes a Venetian public space the setting for an abrupt reversal from staged entertainment to disgrace.

Across these episodes, Italy is at once a place of concentrated loss and a network of routes connecting households, islands, ports, and political territories. Florence’s emptied streets establish the book’s crisis, while Sicily’s change of rule and the journeys through Lipari, Ponza, Genoa, and Venice give that larger frame distinct human consequences. Movement across Italy can mean escape, exile, capture, concealment, or return; the stories repeatedly make geography part of the forces shaping a life.