Wellington the penguin took a shine to the belugas. What to make of all his playfulness at such a moment?Īlong with many others, in mid-March I watched two rockhopper penguins waddling free at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. Boccaccio ends “The Decameron” with a joke about how some readers might dismiss him as a lightweight, although, he explains, he weighs a lot. The stories in the book are largely not new but are instead reincarnations of old familiar tales. It was first read and loved by the very people who watched roughly half their fellow citizens die. This is the structure of Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” a book that has been celebrated now for nearly 700 years.īoccaccio, himself from Florence, most likely began writing “The Decameron” in 1349, the same year his father died, probably of the plague. Most of the stories are silly, some are sad and none are focused on the plague. In another, a heartbroken woman grows basil in a pot that contains her lover’s severed head.
In one story, a nun mistakenly wears her own lover’s trousers on her head, as a wimple. What do these young people do, after fleeing unspeakable suffering and horror? They eat, sing songs and take turns telling one another stories. Wild pigs sniff and tear at the rags of corpses, then convulse and die themselves. Some appear healthy at breakfast but by dinner are sharing a meal, it is said, with their ancestors in another world. The afflicted develop lumps in their groins or armpits, then dark spots on their limbs. It’s 1348, in the time of the bubonic plague. Ten young people decide to quarantine outside Florence.
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