Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio
Episode 3 of 10: How Elena Blew Hot and Cold

Terry Jones introduces another tasty Renaissance tale, starring Lydia Leonard as a widow who snubs the wrong man.

The one hundred stories which make up Giovanni Boccaccio's humane [bad word] masterpiece [bad word] from all over the world.

They are vividly reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes in the cities of Renaissance Italy. But their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern, and their subjects - love, fate, , religion, morality - are universal.

Radio 3 is retelling ten of these choice Florentine Fancies, adapted from Boccaccio by Robin Brooks, and introduced by Terry Jones. Like the original, our stories are told over ten days, each of which has its own theme. You can hear them every evening in the Essay, and in omnibus form on Sunday evenings in Drama on 3.

The music for the series is arranged and performed by Robert Hollingworth, Director of I [bad word]  and the lutenist Paula Chateauneuf, with translations by Silvia Reseghetti. The script consultant is Guyda Armstrong.

Today's theme is: "Tricks which men play on women."

Widowed Elena sleeps around, though she likes to keep up appearances. But when she snubs one man for the amusement of another, she picks the wrong victim.

Giovanni Boccaccio was born to a Florentine banking family in 1313. After an unsuccessful start in law, he turned to his [bad word] love: poetry. humanist and a pupil of Petrarch, Boccaccio's Latin poetry was famous across Europe, and provided the sources for his near-contemporary Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and The Knight's Tale. But his real innovation was the vibrant, vernacular prose in which he wrote The Decameron. Beautifully realised in the teeming voices of merchants and prostitutes, knights and nuns, shopkeepers and conmen, these one hundred stories have [bad word] a bedrock of our storytelling tradition, mined ever since by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Lope de Vega, Christine de Pizan, Swift, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Caryl Churchill and many more.

First broadcast: 04 Dec 2014 (b04sv8q1)
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