VILLA -PALMIERT, 
FLORENCE. 
HE author of the immortal “Decameron,” the 
founder of who can say how many modern 
novels, is believed to have been born by 
the river Mensola, near Settignano. The 
villa, which belonged to his father, has been 
identified by a contract of sale existing in the 
archives of Florence and dated 1336, when Giovanni 
Boccaccio was twenty-three years old. This villa, 
now called Villa Boccaccio, still lies on the hill 
above Villa Palmieri. Some old frescoes were 
found lately, in restoring it. All over this fertile 
land, which must have been almost as thickly 
studded with habitations in his day, as it is now, 
the romancer wandered, marrying fiction to reality. 
He wrote the famous volume of stories of the 
patient Griselda, of Romeo and Juliet, of Isabella 
and her pot of Basil; stories from which Chaucer 
and Shakespeare and Keats—and who shall say how 
many others ?—have borrowed through the centuries. 
And, after more than five hundred years, it is still 
possible to identify the scenes in which he laid 
them. 
Boccaccio was thirty-five the year the great 
plague came to Florence, where it ravaged and 
destroyed, and struck such terror, “that the laws 
of God and man were no more regarded.” Some 
lived licentiously, some temperately, some fled from 
the city. There was no one to nurse the sick, and 
numbers passed out of the world without even a 
witness. In the country, the animals were left to 
roam at will, no one cared to reap the standing 
corn. Between March and July, a hundred thousand 
souls perished in the city alone. ‘ What noble 
palaces were then depopulated to the last inhabitant, 
what families became extinct! What vast posses- 
sions were left, and no known heir to inherit them!” 
He frames his tales in the device of a joyous 
company of seven ladies, ‘‘all discreet, nobly de- 
scended, and perfectly accomplished,” who met in 
Santa Maria Novella, where they agreed to take 
their maids and to retire to the country seat of one 
or the other, and were speedily joined by three 
gentlemen, in whom neither the adversity of the 
times, nor the loss of friends, nor even fear for 
themselves, could stifle, or indeed cool, the passion 
of love. ‘They accordingly set out next day from 
the city, and, after they had travelled two short 
miles, came to the place they had already decided 
upon.” This first halt has been identified as 
Poggio Gherardo, lying above Settignano. It is 
an old castellated house standing high above 
the plain. The entrance-hall is the Loggia men- 
tioned in the Decameron: ‘*The said place 
was on a small height, removed from roads on 
every side, full of various trees and shrubs in full 
greenery and most pleasant to behold. On the 
brow of the hill was a palace with a fine and 
spacious courtyard in the middle, and with loggie 
and halls and rooms, all and each one in_ itself 
beautiful and ornamented with jocund paintings ; 
surrounded with marvellous gardens and with wells 
of coldest water and cellars of rare wines; a thing 
more suited to curious topers than to sober and 
virtuous women.” 
Here one of the ladies, Pampinea, was crowned 
queen, ‘with an honourable and beautiful garland 
of bays.” Though this is a graceful fiction, 
Boccaccio had probably some real lady, a leader 
of Florentine society, in his mind. It was very 
usual to select some lady whose word for the 
time was law, and who settled the way in which 
the hours should be spent. Strolling in the country 
in philosophical discussion, and gathering at some 
spring or charming point of view to tell tales, 
were a part of the proceedings. 
Here, then, the first series of those tales 
was supposed to be told; and the Mensola 
flowing below, is that ‘‘stream of clear water” 
to which the joyous company went slowly down 
to disport themselves at evening, barefooted and 
with bare arms, till they returned to the palace 
for supper, music, and dancing. 
A fresh queen was chosen each day, and at the 
end of the second day, Neifile, being crowned, said, 
“As you know, to-morrow is Friday, and the next 
day Saturday, days apt to be tedious to most 
people on account of the viands ordered to be 
eaten ; besides, Friday was the day on which He 
who died for our life, suffered His passion, and it 
is therefore worthy of reverence. For thus, I 
consider it to be a proper and virtuous thing that 
we should rather say prayers to the worship of 
God than invent tales. And on Saturday it is 
the custom for women to wash their heads, , , 
