| Boccaccio: The Ultimate Survivor |
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Part 2: Il Grande Fratello Is Watching You!
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"How much has the Italian language changed since Boccaccio wrote 'The Decameron'?"
GZTHOMPSON
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It seems that Il Decamerone not only influenced Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and other Renaissance literature, but has lived on in the current generation of game and reality-based TV shows and even spawned a copy-cat program over six centuries later. Big Brother, one of the more popular so-called reality-based TV shows, started in the Netherlands, where it was a huge success, and the formula was quickly repeated in several countries, including Italy.
Il Grande Fratello, like its brethren, has a concept surprisingly similar to Il Decamerone, only with webcams. Ten contestants (!) volunteer to be filmed 24 hours a day without any contact to the outside world. Or as an Italian TV Guide would describe it, "...completamente isolati dal mondo, senza né orologio, né televisione, né telefono." Needless to say, the show has been a commercial success, but not without criticism from the Roman Catholic Church.
The titillating antics of ten young, sexy, sophisticated Italians in a modern apartment with a pool and garden surrounded by 30 cameras and 60 microphones, while possibly entertaining in sound-bites or coming attraction trailers, does not necessarily make for classic, rich culture. Il Decamerone examined a society that was self-destructing due to the devastating effects of the plague. The people in 14th-century Italy suffered terribly, as the book's prelude makes clear, and the large numbers of those who fell ill were abandoned by both their friends and family.
Apart from the historical backdrop, though, the great charm of the "Decameron" lies in the wonderful richness and variety of the adventures, in the many types of characters and the close analysis of all shades of feeling and passion, from the basest to the noblest. While the storytellers may have been part of Boccaccio's literary license, the situations don't ring hollow and contrived like they do in MTV's "The Real World," "The 1900 House" on PBS, and "Making the Band" on ABC.
Boccaccio: The Ultimate Survivor > Page 1, 2
