Morris Karp and Francesca Zambon interview Brown University faculty members Ronald Martinez and Massimo Riva on the renewed interest in Boccaccio’s Decameron in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the historical parallels between the 14th century and the present time, the experience of isolation and love and what it reveals about social privileges and inequities, and the relation between the Decameron’s framing story and the collected novellas. The conversation took place on May 26, 2020.

This publication is part of a project devoted to analyzing the Italian philosophical response to the COVID-19 pandemic, developed in the Spring 2020 collaborative humanities graduate seminar “Italian Thought: Inside and Out” taught by Laura Odello and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. Read more on the blog of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at https://blogs.brown.edu/humanities/archives/304