The Decameron

De: Giovanni Boccaccio

Narrado por: Simon Russell Beale, Gunnar Cauthery, Alison Pettitt, Daisy Badger, Carly Bawden, Lucy Briggs-Owen, full cast

The Decameron is one of the greatest literary works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio's answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2008 Oxford University Press (Translation) (P)2017 Naxos AudioBooks

Loverly

The Decameron is a bit like Metamorphosis. A very large collection of short punchy stories. The stories here are just that. No philosophy or metaphors, no language experiments. Just great fun. The cast and performances are splendid.

Easy listen, fun stories, great readers.

Easy listen, fun stories, great readers... The best audiobook I have heard in a few years, and I go through 20-40 hours of audiobooks pr month. Try this one.

A delightful listen!

Who would have thought that a book written in 1350 could be so much fun? The cast (British) do a wonderful job here and the stories are very funny. It gives a great feeling for life in the Renaissance. I highly recommend this recording.

Wonderful translation and presentation

That is it. A very modern and approachable translation, and the readers are all superb.

Wonderful narrative!

This was such a great listen! The stories were fanciful, there was lots of humor, and it was nice that you could hear a few short stories and then come back to the book and not miss anything really. Lots of satire, commentary on society, and philosophy woven into each entertaining story grouping. I loved it!

A Medieval Masterwork

The Decameron by Boccaccio is one of the great works of Medieval Italian literature. When I decided to read and study it, I had no idea that it would be so much fun. It consists of 100 short stories said to be invented by a group of young people needing respite from the Black Death. The themes tend to focus on sex and misbehaving clergy all told with wit and charm. The group of actors for this recording do a fabulous job of keeping the listener entertained through the 28 hours of the entire work. My only complaint is that nothing is indexed. I wanted to look up certain stories and could not easily find them.

Great rendering and very enjoyable

Excellent performance and interesting translation, although not the most accurate. The tale rubrics are missing.

Listening to the voices of the past

After listening to this, I wish I understand Italian love to listen to girls voices in the original language

Terrific all around

That the writing is good has long been known, but I think the translation is deserving of high praise. The performers doing the narrating /story telling are excellent. Highly recommend.

Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, Tales Eloquently Told

Having read Chaucer early on, and having just finished Apuleius's The Golden Ass, I was charmed finding some of the same elements, scenarios, and characters preserved here in distinctive detail; this work is a wellspring of sophisticated romance, and as the party travels, regailing each other with tales that end in various ways, baudy farces, passionate love, gratified in some cases, perloined in others, schemes and plots devised and documented with entertaining cunning, great and noble tragedies that give Shakespeare a run for his money. I'm not fluent enough to have read the original Florentine, but the vocabulary used here is ornate, but still timeless enough to be compelling; it's not a surprise, given his liturgical education that some phraseology used would be biblical in nature, but refreshingly feminist notions and concepts are expressed, perhaps in our study and enjoyment of a work like this, we can find a sort of equalism, and in these troubling times, much solace and wisdom can be found in these volumes. The Naxos Team did a fantastic job bringing this rich work to life in the way that they have, music, and the vibrant, theatrically trained narrators breathe youthful, soulful emotion into their roles they read, and more often than not, they achieve their transport to tell the tales as best and honestly as they could be told. It's no challenge to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonists of these tales, and their plight is felt more closely, given the candid nature of the recitations that are given. In the same way that Chaucer did, it is easy to imagine the tales told could go one way or the other, and given no assurance that one tale will lead to tragic ends or not, it's easier to witness these stories told in a mood of suspense, rather than a journey towards the inevitable as so many tales tend to be, with a happy ever after ending being assured to placate the reader. Rather, the tales that haunt are those where requited love leads to tragic ends. Though the tone of some of these stories may seem avuncular in some ways, the well intentioned heart of the author and his aims toward mercy and agency in spite of orthodoxy shine through, and it is fascinating to see such tales told from a world that has changed so much in some ways, and so little in others. Endlessly worth your time and rapt attention, the Decameron demands it on the most obliging and humble terms. I'm grateful that these stories were preserved in such cosmopolitan and articulate stories, given the opportunity to explore this world preserved for you, I hope that you may find them in the same such.