The plague struck the City of Florence in 1348. A contemporary poet and writer, Giovanni Boccaccio, imagined a group of fashionable young people fleeing the plague and spending a lockdown on an estate in the Tuscan countryside. They entertained themselves by telling stories. Of course, the tales were all written by Boccaccio himself and he published them in 1354 under the title The Decameron.
When the Covid-19 pandemic produced lockdown in Cape Town, author Stanislas M. Yassukovich decided to emulate this idea, and wrote a collection of over 20 stories which he circulated to a group of family and friends - all in lockdown in various parts of the world. These are the ones his first readers liked best.
Boccaccio’s Decameron contains some one hundred tales. This collection is more sparing of the reader - just as the Covid-19 pandemic has fortunately been more sparing than the 14th century Plague.