The Inferno is the first third of Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, originally written in the Tuscan dialect of Italian. It was written in the early years of the 14th century. In a time when all serious literary works invariably were written in Latin, Dante deliberately chose his native language to present his epic, hence the word comedy describing a subject that is far from light entertainment. The poem was published in Italy a full century before Gutenberg's press revolutionized the printing and publishing industry. Although there are no known copies in Dante's hand that have survived to the present day, there are several hundred in manuscript form, some dating back to a few years after Dante's death. The first known copy to appear in print dates from 1472, over one hundred and fifty after Dante first published the work.

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In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron. The Decameron was written after the Black Plague spread through Italy in 1348. Most of the tales did not originate with Boccaccio; some of them were centuries old already in his time, but Boccaccio imbued them all with his distinctive style. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to comedy, from lewd to inspiring, and sometimes all of those at once. They also provide a detailed picture of daily life in fourteenth-century Italy.