“The Decameron.” The greatest prose work of the Early Renaissance: 100 novellas, loosely united by a framing plot about young Italian gentlemen and their ladies who fled to a country estate from a plague epidemic and passed the time with entertaining stories. And what stories—apparently, all of 14th-century Italy itself boils, breathes, laughs, and weeps within them: its mischievous humor, the mixture of sincere faith and audacious freethinking, enterprise and cunning, wild temperament and an untamable thirst for life and love, happiness and the widest variety of pleasures.