From 1348 to 1353 Giovanni wrote his classic, the Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories told by a group of young ladies and gentlemen during a retreat from Florence in order to escape the plague. Many people consider this book as the greatest of all that were written about the plague. The plague itself killed millions of people and changed the world as a whole. Many families, communities, and cities were wiped out all together. During and after the plague most art and writings were about death and the plague. Throughout The Decameron the stories represent how the plague devastated the region and how it affected the lives of people in Italy where Boccaccio lived. .
The plague had large scale social and economic effects. Many of which are recorded in the introduction of The Decameron. People abandoned their friends and family, fled cities, and shut themselves off from the world. The ten young men and women who are telling the stories fled from the city of Florence to escape the plague. Since it was so difficult and dangerous to produce goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from far away increased. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce. Even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. Because of this the prices of food, clothing, and other necessities rose. .
Throughout the book, Boccaccio wrote about how the plague swept over the land and how the people couldn't stop it. He wrote "No physician's prescriptions, no medicine seemed of the slightest benefit as a cure for this disease" (7). He later says "Or because doctors were unable to discover its origins and therefore could not apply the proper remedy, not only did few people recover but indeed nearly all the sick would succumb within three days of their first symptoms" (7). .
Boccaccio writes extensively about religion and how it changed because of the plague.