The Decameron deals directly with thoughts about life and death; it is a recounting of the Black Death as it occurred in Florence, Italy. At the beginning, “First Day”, there is an explanation of the effect of the large number of deaths on the people of Florence. Then it moves on to a story about a group of young people who escape the plague and live outside of the city. The ideas expressed by the speaker and the characters include the right to guard one’s own life, the importance of enjoying life and having a governing system, and the toll that mass death and paranoia has on a population and its psyche.
In the middle of the Decameron’s “First Day,” Pampinea and six other young women are gathered in the church, and Pampinea has a plan to leave the city and find somewhere safer to live. She says, “Every person born into this world has a natural right to sustain, preserve, and
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For example, the speaker says, “for it was quite apparent that's the one thing which, in normal times, no wise man had ever learned to accept with patient resignation… had now been brought home to the feeble-minded as well, but the scale of the calamity caused them to regard it with indifference.” The “it” that speaker is talking about is the death that the Black Plague brought Florence, Italy. He brings us the idea that death in large numbers had a large impact on human beings. It made them calloused and cold-hearted when it came to mourning and burying the dead, because of the fear of being infected, and the sheer amount of deaths had numbed them to it, as much as a human being could be. He mentions that, “... This scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers… Fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children as though they did not belong to