. >> guest: boccaccio. i'd never read boccaccio. we only read rabelais. there was a--there was a pes... c-span: who was boccaccio? >> guest: boccaccio was a great humanist, comes after dante in florence, and--and did everything. he wrote early kind of psychological novels, and he was a scholar of dante. and he also--during the--he wrote this extraordinary collection of stories, "the decameron," about young aristocratic men and women who leave the city of florence during the black plague and entertain themselves up in the hills in a very decorous way: they tell dirty stories. now their--their conduct is impeccable--personal conduct. there--there's a frame around the stories. and they're not being prigs; they're keeping certain possibilities alive while this awful plague is going--is going on. now not all the stories are erotic, but many of them are. and i had never read them before except, perhaps, in playboy, i had read--stealing the magazine from under the counselor's bed when i was maybe 13, back then in the early f--middle '50s. and you know, after loo