page_title: Summary of Decameron tales
section_title: First day
hierarchical_section_title: Summary of Decameron tales / First day
caption_attribution_description: Santa Maria Novella, a church in Florence, Italy Own photo - photo made by Georges Jansoone on 12 October 2005
context_page_description: Each story of the Decameron begins with a short heading explaining the plot of the story. The 1903 J. M. Rigg translation headings are used in many of these summaries. Commentary on the tale itself follows.
context_section_description: Before beginning the story-telling sessions, the ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, referred to as the Brigata, gather at the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella and together decide to escape the Black Death by leaving the city to stay in a villa in the countryside for the next two weeks. Each agrees to tell one story each day for ten days. The stories are told in the garden of the first villa that the company stays at, which is located a few miles outside the city.
  Under the rule of Pampinea, the first day of story-telling is open topic. Although there is no assigned theme of the tales this first day, six deal with one person censuring another and four are satires of the Catholic Church.
caption: The basilica of Santa Maria Novella, with a Renaissance façade that was completed about 100 years after The Decameron was written
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