The Decameron

Boccaccio frames his stories with ten young people who leave Florence to escape the plague, and begins with an account of the plague itself. He speaks of it as “the late mortal pestilence” and says that he saw some of what he describes with his own eyes. His translator held it certain that Boccaccio was not in Florence during the plague and had his details from witnesses; the text itself claims otherwise.

The passage is the opening of a work of fiction, and its purpose is literary. It is cited here for what a Florentine of the time says the plague was like, and for the figure of the dead, which he gives as what “is believed”, not as a count.