In lockdown the world can become almost a single room. Our minds turn inward, and when so much of what we listen to, watch or read is about symptoms and statistics and far off vaccines, it’s hardly ...

In the year then of our Lord 1348, there happened at Florence, the finest city in all Italy, a most terrible plague… Boccaccio’s book, written between 1348 and 1353, has been acclaimed as an exemplar ...

THE love which Dante so magisterially celebrated and to which Boccaccio was paying his faltering tribute in the Ameto was the mother, not of religion, but of culture. Christianity had turned the ...

Loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century collection of short stories, the series follows a group of Italian nobles and servants who flee to the countryside to escape the Black Death Based on ...

This is it, the storybook which, one is tempted to say, began the modern European narrative tradition. It may seem a bit rich to call something over six and a half centuries old "modern", but look at ...

UPON the outskirts of the city of Naples lies the tomb of Virgil. The body of the great poet was laid there nineteen years before the beginning of the Christian Era, and during all the tumultuous ...

Ten young people decide to quarantine outside Florence. It’s 1348, in the time of the bubonic plague. The afflicted develop lumps in their groins or armpits, then dark spots on their limbs. Some ...

Give writer-director Jeff Baena credit: Even when he aims high, that doesn’t stop him from going deliciously low. With “The Little Hours,” Baena takes his inspiration from no less rarefied a text than ...