Giovanni Boccaccio watched the Black Death kill half the population of Florence in 1348 and responded by writing the Decameron — one hundred stories told by ten young people who have fled the plague to a villa in the countryside. The book was bawdy, irreverent, and brilliantly crafted, and it did something unprecedented: it treated ordinary human experience — lust, greed, cleverness, folly — as worthy of serious literary attention, laying the groundwork for the modern novel.

This episode traces Boccaccio from his illegitimate birth through the plague that devastated Florence, the composition of the Decameron, and the friendship with Petrarch that shaped the early Italian Renaissance.

• Boccaccio's illegitimate birth and his father's failed attempt to make him a banker
• The Black Death in Florence — the apocalyptic context th ...