Who wrote the 14th-century Italian story collection "The Decameron"?

The 14th-century Italian story collection The Decameron was written by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Boccaccio’s work is structured as a frame narrative: seven young women and three young men leave plague-stricken Florence and shelter at a countryside villa. Over ten storytelling days, the group tells 100 tales, producing the collection’s name, which derives from Greek words meaning “ten days.”

The stories range widely in tone and subject. They include romance, deception, comic tricks, tragic turns, clever merchants, religious figures, and ordinary people navigating luck and social power. Boccaccio wrote in Florentine Italian rather than Latin, helping establish vernacular prose as a major vehicle for serious literature.

The Black Death provides the story’s opening setting, but The Decameron is not a single plague chronicle. Its storytellers create an imagined community organized around conversation, rules, music, and daily themes. Readers sometimes confuse Boccaccio with Dante or Petrarch because all three belong to the central tradition of early Italian literature. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, while Petrarch is especially associated with lyric poetry and the sonnet tradition.