Let Isolation Be Your Muse

Being cooped up at home is tough. But quarantine has long been a powerful catalyst for stunning art, memorable literature – and even the theory of gravity

- Jacky Colliss Harvey

I want you to imagine an Italian city, the streets full of that liquid golden sunlight only Italy can produce – but with not a soul in sight. Absolute silence, all around. No sudden bursts of chatter, no echoing church bells. Nothing. All the doors closed. And some of those doors might have crosses painted on them.

No, this is not Milan, or Verona, or Bologna in 2020 (where some of my dearest friends are battling the worst that coronavirus has thrown at any of us), this was Florence in 1348, a whole city hunkered down and fighting its way, day by day, though the Black Death, the worst pandemic Europe at that time had ever experienced.

Yet it was at just this moment that a 35-year-old Florentine writer named Giovanni Boccaccio put pen to paper to create the first stories of The Decameron.

The plot of The Decameron really couldn’t be simpler, or literally more escapist. Ten bright young things flee the plague for a villa in the Tuscan countryside, and pass the time there telling each other stories – the frothiest, silliest, sexiest, most melodramatic, soap opera-ish stories you can imagine. Love Island with added inkwells.

Nonetheless, without The Decameron there would have been no Canterbury Tales from Geoffrey Chaucer, written 40 years later, in which a group of pilgrims heading off from London to Canterbury while away the journey by, you guessed it, telling stories.

There might have been no All’s Well That Ends Well from William Shakespeare either, and maybe a completely different plot-twist to his Cymbeline. But Boccaccio did much more than just fill a treasure-chest for other writers to plunder: he was also bearing witness to something basic in the human spirit.