Waking up at noon (or later) on a Sunday does have its pitfalls when one needs to be in bed at a reasonable hour, have daytime fun, and yet finish a long list of chores…reading and writing being one of my chores.
The story is cute, I read it quickly, I can’t find any images that suit it, nor can I imagine any. So, here’s the deal: these Florentine guys go to a town in Germany, and everyone in town is hurrying to the church because a man has died who has been declared a saint, which means his body can heal the sick. So the Florentines pretend that one of them is sick, and the other two helping him walk, they take him to the church, place him on top of the saint, and he pretends that he’s been healed. Someone who knows him calls him out on it, he nearly gets lynched, and after being hauled off to court a prince who knows him gets him off the hook without a hassle. The end.
To mention, two things:
1) it somehow goes without explanation that these Florentines spend all their time going from place to place, hanging out with princes, and doing funny impressions of people just for the hell of it. I must take the assumption that they’re socialites; it’s rare that Boccaccio leaves a profession out of a person’s description, or a more complete explanation of a person’s circumstances.
2) this is, I’m pretty sure, the first story that strikes me as being contemporaneous as the storytelling, and, furthermore, of being a story about natives to the narrators’ home, Florence.
I’d love to come up with something of more significance to discuss, but I can’t.
arts & fetters 