The Florentine plague

The Florentine plague is the 1348 epidemic that opens the Decameron’s frame narrative, transforming Florence through mass death, fear of contagion, and the breakdown of family and civic care. It is both a historical calamity as the narrative presents it and the immediate condition that sends a company of seven women and three young men away from the city: their retreat creates the setting in which a hundred stories and songs are told for diversion and consolation.

Outbreak and reported symptoms

The account dates the plague’s arrival in Florence to 1348, after it had appeared in the East and spread westward. Officials attempted to purge the city, bar the sick from entering, and provide measures for preserving health. Devout people made repeated supplications, including processions. These efforts, the narrative says, did not prevent the disease from showing its effects as spring began.

The first signs described are swellings in the groin or beneath the armpits. Some grow to the size of an ordinary apple, others to that of an egg; the people call them plague-boils. The swellings spread to other parts of the body, and the illness is also marked by black or livid blotches, appearing on the arms and thighs before spreading more widely. In the account, both kinds of mark signal approaching death.

Physicians’ advice and medicines seem unable to help. The narrator attributes this either to the nature of the infection or to the inability of many practitioners, including people without medical training, to understand its origin and take appropriate measures. Most of the stricken die within three days of the signs appearing, often without fever or another complication. The account stresses how swiftly and indiscriminately the illness advances rather than offering a clinical explanation of it.

Contagion and the collapse of care

The danger is intensified by the fear—and, in the narrative, the apparent reality—of transmission through contact. The sick infect the healthy through conversation and association, while touching clothing or other objects used by the ill is also said to spread the disease. The narrator supports this extraordinary claim with an episode he presents as personal witness: rags belonging to a poor man who had died of the plague are thrown into the street; two hogs root among them, take them in their mouths, and soon fall dead on the rags. The scene extends the reach of the epidemic beyond human contact and makes ordinary objects seem perilous.

Fear alters social obligations. Neighbors avoid one another, kin seldom visit, and even close relatives abandon one another; some parents refuse to tend their own children. The sick are left to the few friends who still help or to servants attracted by unusually high wages. Those servants are scarce, often inexperienced, and many die while caring for the ill. The lack of attendants also changes the conditions of care: women who fall sick may have to expose their bodies to male caretakers when necessity requires it. The account suggests that this abandonment and exposure could affect modesty among women who recover, while also emphasizing that some people die for want of care they might otherwise have received.

Competing ways of facing the danger

Florentines respond to the plague with sharply opposed forms of self-protection. Some withdraw into houses where no one has been sick, form small companies, eat and drink moderately, avoid excess, and exclude news of death and illness. They use music and other available diversions to keep the crisis at a distance. Others argue that drinking, feasting, singing, roaming, and satisfying every appetite are the best defense. They go from tavern to tavern and enter other people’s houses when something there appeals to them, amid the widespread abandonment of property and ordinary responsibility. Yet even those who pursue this reckless gaiety continue, as far as they can, to avoid the sick.

A further response is flight. Many abandon their homes, relatives, and possessions for country houses, behaving as if the danger will remain within the city walls. The account denies that any strategy guarantees safety: people of different persuasions fall ill in different places, and some of those who had been healthy later receive no care from others. Flight thus offers the company a practical means of leaving, but not proof that anyone can command the outcome.

The plague as the frame for storytelling

The epidemic makes the company’s departure intelligible. Pampinea argues that the women should leave the city and move from one place to another with their maids and necessary belongings, seeking what pleasure and diversion the season allows. She presents departure not as abandonment of others but as a response to the fact that relatives have died or fled and left the women alone. Filomena supports the need for guidance before they set out, fearing that the women’s company might otherwise dissolve; the exchange shows that their escape must be organized, not merely desired.

The plague remains present even after the group reaches the countryside. During a morning outing, the company encounters wild goats, deer, and other animals standing unusually tame and unafraid of hunters, as if the prevailing epidemic had made them secure from pursuit. The people wear garlands of oak leaves and carry flowers and herbs; their walk, songs, meal, dancing, and music form a deliberately shared rhythm of life against the deaths behind them. The narrative does not make the countryside a cure. Instead, it makes temporary distance, companionship, and storytelling possible within a world still governed by danger.

The plague also explains the work the book sets itself. Its narrator presents stories as comfort, especially for women in love, whose restricted domestic lives leave them fewer ways than men to distract themselves from sorrow. The company’s tales therefore answer the epidemic’s isolation with repeated acts of listening and speaking. Against a disaster that breaks households apart and makes ordinary contact frightening, the frame gathers people together to tell stories, sing, and sustain attention to pleasures and misfortunes alike.