which is to say an oral and monophonic one. The beginnings of its literate tradition can be found in a
favorite book of the period, the oft-translated Decameron by the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–
75), the trecento’s great prose classic. Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (for which it served as model),
the Decameron is a collection of tales motivated by a situation that brings together a social microcosm,
whose members regale one another with titillating, often ribald stories that vividly expose contemporary
mores and social attitudes.
The setting is Florence in 1348, the year of the plague. A group of seven young ladies and three young
gentlemen have fled the infested city to the suburbs, where they go from villa to villa, enjoying the
sybaritic pleasures of the countryside as they wait out the epidemic. On each of ten days each member of
the party tells a tale, and the day’s entertainments are formally concluded with the performance of a
ballata—either one known by heart or, in some cases, one improvised on the spot—by a member of the
company, accompanied by others (again, extemporaneously) on various instruments. It was in ostensibly
“transcribing” the fruits of the oral culture, as it were, that Boccaccio made literary genres out of the
secular prose tale, on the one hand, and the ballata, on the other.
EX. 10-3 Gherardello da Firenze, Tosto che l’alba (caccia)