Boccaccio 2015

Filomena tells the story.

Story of 3 merchant brothers (bourgeois society) - Not of a very loft class (rich due to inheretence). They had a beatufiul sister called Lisabetta who falls in love with Lorenzo who works for her brothers a "rather dashing and handsomely proportioned" young man. Lorenzo loves her equally and "before very long they gratified their dearest wishes, taking care not to be discovered". However one of the brothers discovers them and they decide to kill him instead of revealing all. They kill him on a pleasure trip and bury him. Lisabetta was filled with "strange forboding" and was "refrained from asking questions" about his whereabouts but she would repeatedly "utter his name and beseech him to come to her". One night Lorenzo appears to her in a dream and "described the place where they had buired him" and told her "not to call for him...any longer". She goes to the place he showed her and uncovered her lovers body, chops off the head and put it in a jar of Basil. "Taking the head to her room, she locked herself in and cried bitterly, weeping so profusely that she saturated it with her tears as well as at the same time implanting a thousand kisses upon it" however the brothers beceame suspicious as she "took to sitting permanently beside this pot" and they expressed "their concern at the decline in her good looks, and the way in which her eyes appeared to have sunk into their sockets". They steal it back from her and she kept asking for it. They find out what is inside. Horrified, they leave the city and go to live in Naples, living Lisabette who falls into ilnness and dies.

It is Elissa's story. Painter called Calandrino is the protagonist with his fellow painters Bruno and Buffalmacco who are described as a "jovial pair, but they were also shrewd and perceptive...they went about with calandrino because his simple-mindness and the quaintness of his ways were an endless source of amusement to them". A successful young man called Maso del Saggio decides to play a trick on him telling him about the stone (The Heliotrope) which has the miraculous power of making people invisible when they are out of sight. He takes everything Maso says seriously even though he says ridiculous things about a "mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese" and "a stream of Vernaccia wine". He runs to Bruno and Buffalmacco and says "Pay attention to me; my friends and we can become the richest men in Florence.. I reckon we ought to go there right away before anyone else does. We'll find it without a doubt, because I know what it looks like". "Then Buffalmacco asked him what the stone wwas called but Calandrino being rather dense had already forgotten its name". They go there he picks up loads of stones in his shirt and in his skirt. They play the trick "Where's Calandrino got to?", they say convincingly "I can't say I blame him for leaving us  like this.... What a pair of block heads we are!". They follow him home, throwing stones at his him. He doesn't meet anyone on his way home. His wife Monna Tessa scoulds him "Where the devil have you been?". "All those things lose their virtue in the presence of a woman.

Fiammetta's story. A young horsedealer Andreuccio di pietro went to a market to buy horses. He is stupid "made offers for several of them without however being able to strike a single bargain" and "he kept pulling out his purse, bulging with florins and waving it about in full view of all the passers by". Two ladies walk by, she sees the cash and "as determined to see if she could find some way of relieving him of the whole or a part of his cash". She devises an "ingenious plan for achieving her object". He is told a "gentlewoman" wants to speak to him and "Andreuccio immediately assumed, on looking himself up and down and thinking what a handsome fellow he was, that the woman must have fallen in love with him". She is wearing finery and takes him to her bedroom fragrant with flowers and he was "firmly convinced that the ludy must be nothing less than a genuine aristocrat". She pretends they are half brother and sister, inquiring about his relatives (being able to name them individually because of her older companion". They sat back down to a supper, with her "cunningly prolonged until darkness had completely fallen". He falls into the street through the door whilst going to the toilet. She searches for the money in the clothes and finds it and then locks the door. He says "Oh poor me! What a sudden way to lose five hundred florins and a sister in one day!" and if its "really true that Sicilians make a habit of discovering blood-relatives and then forgetting all about them, at least give me back the clothes I left there". He pounds on the door but a big bully of a man calls out "I don't know what restrains me from coming down there and giving you the biggest pasting you've had. Neighbours warn him to leave.

He goes to wash himself ins sea as he smells but he see's two people coming towards him so he hides in a hut. They come in the hut also and can smell him so he reveals himself and tells them his story. They say "Listen friend...if you hadn't fallen, you can rest assured that as soon as you were asleep you would have been done in". They show him the well with a pulley and a big bucket for a wash. The bucket wasnt there so they tied him to the rope and lowered him down. Officers on the watch come down for a drink and the 2 robbers run away. They bring up Andreuccio. He goes with the men to steal from the grave of Archbishop Messer Filipo Minutolo (Of Napes) who is "buired with some very valuable regalia and wearing a ruby ring on his finger". Nobody wants to go in so they make Andreuccio "we'll give you such a hammering over the pate with these iron bars that we'll kill you stone dead". So shaking with fear he enters. He puts the ring on his own finger and starts handing all the stuff out. He then told them there was not anything left. They said there must be and shut him in the tomb. He bursts into tears thinking that he would die of hunger. Another group of thieves come forward. The priest says "What are you afraid of?.... Dead men don't eat the living, I will go in myself". Grabs the priest by his legs, drags him in. They run away. He goes back to the inn "After telling them what had happened he was urged by the inkeeper to leave Naples at once."

Nastalgio in love young lady from the Traversai family (far more noble lineage) and squanders his wealth without being loved in return. The girl he loved was persistently cruel, harsh and unfriendly towards him. She became haughty and contemptuous of him and loathed him for everything he stood for. He longed to kill himself in despair. Friends concerned about exhausting himself and his inheritance advised him to leave so much that he couldn't refused. Went to a place called Classe, three miles distant from the city, pitching a camp, living like a lord. He wanders into the pinewoods He see's a "naked woman, young and very beautiful" with her flesh torn by the brambles. He saw bringing up the rear a swarthy looking knight his face contorted with anger followed by fierce mastiffs. He took up the branch of a tree to serve as a cudgel and prepared for battle. The knight says "I love her far more deeply than you love that Traversari girl of yours...I killed myself in sheer despair with this rapier that you see in my hand, and thus I am condemned to eternal punishment. My death pleased her beyond measure, but shortly thereafter she too died... Every time I catch up with her, I kill her with this same rapier by which I took my own life, then I slit her back open... I tear from that body, that hard, cold heart". THis happens every friday at this hour. He uses this story, inviting the woman he loves to a banquet in the pine tree's. The knight repeats to them the story and delt with the girl the same way, leaving the women weeping. "So great was the fear... that in order to avoid a similar fate she coverrted her enmity to love" and becomes his wife and they live a happy marriage together".