Where It All Goes Down
Florence, Italy, 1348
The story begins in Florence, Italy, circa 1348, around the time of an outbreak of the Plague and at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. Boccaccio gives a grim description of the city as it's gripped by the epidemic: houses emptied of occupants, dead bodies rotting in the streets, bodies piled on boards and brought to burial in sixes and sevens to be dumped in mass graves. The social order has completely broken down and it's every man for himself in an effort to survive. The most poignant description of setting is of the psychological landscape. We hear from the members of the brigata that there's no point in going home because the all houses are empty.
Not a pretty picture. But a brief digression: Don't blame the Florentines. Here's a 2014 report about the Ebola panic:
The disease has turned the social fabric on its head. Extended family usually takes orphans in, but fear has broken the chain. "We noticed that with this crisis, which is almost a humanitarian catastrophe, people flee their villages, and abandon their families and their children," said Fassou Isidor Lama, a UNICEF child protection officer. (Source)
The ladies and gentlemen of the brigata seek refuge in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. They have gone there to pray, of course, but you'll notice that the ladies are sitting together and chatting. There are two reasons for this: the church is central to the community, usually as a place of communal worship and the practice of the sacraments; and since the plague has turned things topsy-turvy, interpretations of place have changed. While the church is still a sacred space, the need for a "clean" meeting place has turned it into a medieval safe house of sorts.
When the group leaves Florence, they don't go too far. It's only about two miles to the first palace, and another mile or so to the second one. Remember that the crew changes location to keep things fresh, but also to avoid other groups fleeing from the city. The palaces and their grounds are classic examples of loci amoeni, or pleasant places. They have beautiful natural spaces, walled gardens (horti conclusi), chirping birds and friendly bunnies, fountains and streams, flowers positively bursting out everywhere. It's the perfect setting to forget about mortality and to step out of time for while.
It's a psychological place as well as a physical place. The first thing the group does after arriving at the country place is to establish a schedule and a routine: a daily leader is assigned, a daily topic announced; stories, meals, naps, and play are all done during scheduled times. It's an attempt to escape the chaos and breakdown in the city and to re-establish a sense of normalcy and order. When things are falling apart, it's a comfort to cling to familiar routines. For two weeks, no one has to be lonely or frightened.
The settings of the stories themselves vary greatly, though many of them take place throughout Italy (the top three locations are Florence, Naples and Sicily). The sweeping romance stories tend to have more exotic locations, such as England, Paris, Tunis, Crete, and Jerusalem. Since most of the stories relate to people that the brigata either knew personally or to those of local reputation, most stories at least begin in Italy.
It's never explicitly mentioned in The Decameron, but many people believe that the brigata's retreat was near Fiesole, a hill town overlooking the city of Florence, just a short bus ride away today. Fiesole does have some pretty gorgeous medieval castles and estates. GB's early 20th-century biographer Edward Hutton is sure that the two palaces are easily identified as the Poggio Gherardo and the Villa Palmieri. Any Tuscan travel guide will assure you that the Valle Della Donne, the Valley of the Ladies, is easily found in a stroll through the hills near Fiesole. And you can even get married in a hortus conclusus.
As the plague decimated the Italian society and economy, half the workers dead or deadly ill, the nobility depended more and more on the merchant classes to keep the economy afloat. This contributed to the waning of the feudal economy, which had already been in decline (source). The era of The Decameron is one of transition between medieval and modern culture.