Considering Boccaccio's Decameron only as a "classic" does not render justice to its narrative structure, geometric and complex. For each of its aspects reveals the subversive potential of its narrative. Both the hundred novels and the frame, evoking the Black Death epidemic in 1348, make it into the first organic book in the Literature of the West, a text with a planned architecture. A careful reading, however, can identify a new novella, this one whose number is 101 (in the Introduction of the forth Day): a striking lack of narrative closure and of its architecture. Ciappelletto, the protagonist of the first novel, is transformed from the "worst man in the world" into a hypothetical Saint and Griselda, the heroine of last novel, shows her hyperbolic virtues turning in cruel cynicism. The Decameron thus creates its own future, because it represent an exaustive Mimesis of his age, and at the same time, creates a radical ironic break, or rather an elusive one; becoming a model for the Renaissance comedies and a hermeneutic paradigm for the use of irony. From that point of view, the Decameron could be considered an intriguing response to the current debate on what is contemporary.
irony; eroticism; deconstruction; classics (rereading of); Decameron; Giovanni Boccaccio; architecture