, and even that of the middle class, was dreadful. Once dead, victims’ bodies were simply dragged out the door. Quantities of decomposing bodies could be seen in the streets until the becchini (paid gravediggers) carted them off to any available unoccupied grave. For people who died in their homes alone, days could pass before their bodies were discovered, usually by the stench.
The normally fine funerals reserved for the upper class were also set aside. Few were honored or mourned with the traditional pomp. Without ceremony, and often unaccompanied by family, they were carried to the nearest churchyard where trenches were dug and the bodies unceremoniously and quickly buried. Before long, as Boccaccio dramatically states, the city was “full of corpses.”8
Because of fear, or maybe sometimes out of necessity, groups of the Florentine citizenry dealt with the plague in different ways.9 There were individuals in Florence who “lived entirely apart from everyone else . . . where there were no sick people at all.” Their wise decisions are suggestive of behavior practiced now by many facing the present pandemic.
There were others in Florence, Boccaccio tells us, who followed a “middle course.” They did not “shut themselves up, but went around carrying in their hands flowers, or sweet-smelling herbs, or various kinds of spices; . . . Often they would put these things to their noses, believing that such smells were a wonderful means to purify the brain. . . .” This would have been an attempt to protect themselves from the miasmic pestilence in the air, as had been suggested by Vitruvius, Galen, and others. Would masks have protected these individuals, or at least minimized their infection? In a flea-borne disease, the answer is no.
The final group that Boccaccio bluntly labels bestiale is particularly relevant to our times because they seem familiar. They, like some individuals today, were not careful at all. Boccaccio writes, “they believed that drinking too much, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying . . . the appetites, as best one could, laughing and making light of everything that happened was the best medicine for such a disease. . . . Doing their best to avoid the sick, leaving them die unattended,” they did, however, often party in deserted houses, treating them as if they were “common property. . . .” This sort of behavior, Boccaccio says, left everyone “free to do as they pleased . . . while the revered authority of the laws, both divine and human law had fallen” by the wayside. Ultimately, many people died needlessly in Florence that could have been saved.
Boccaccio’s most distinguished critic, Vittore Branca, has rightly called The Decameron a masterpiece for the author’s use of vernacular prose, his middle-class attitudes, and his psychological approach to a “very human picture of a decisive period in history.”10 But for today’s informed reader, Boccaccio appears to be more than a man of his times, since his words, thoughts, and realistic observations still have relevance today in addressing the behaviors and approach to the present pandemic.
- Giovanni Boccaccio, “Introduction,” in The Decameron. trans. and ed. Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 3-17.
- Boccaccio, “Introduction,” 3; Boccaccio knew that the Black Death originated in the East and that it had arrived in northern Italy earlier in 1348, moving east to “westerly” toward Florence.
- Boccaccio, “Introduction,” 3. It is now known today that the miasma theory actually originated in ancient times. See Joseph Byrne, The Black Death (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press: 2004), 42.
- Boccaccio, “Introduction,” 3. The author never mentions the miasma himself. But by traditional necessity he does briefly mention God and the “influence of heavenly bodies.” At the end of this discussion, however, he more realistically turns his attention to the city’s filth.
- For the medical history of the Y. pestis as the real cause of the Florentine plague we are dependent on the direct quotes and summary provided by: Jay 