How Elena Blew Hot and Cold

The one hundred stories which make up Giovanni Boccaccio’s humane and comic masterpiece come from all over the world. This Renaissance work is considered a landmark in the history of literature.

The stories are vividly reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes in the cities of fourteenth-century Italy. But their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern, and their subjects - love, fate, sex, religion, morality - are universal.

“Tricks which men play on women.”

Widowed Elena sleeps around, though she likes to keep up appearances. But when she snubs one man for the amusement of another, she picks the wrong victim.

Elena ..... Lydia Leonard
Rinieri ..... Cyril Nri
Violante ..... Elaine Claxton
Pyrrhus ..... Paul Heath

Adapted by Robin Brooks
Music arranged and performed by Robert Hollingworth and Paula Chateauneuf
Lyric translations by Silvia Reseghetti
Script consultant: Guyda Armstrong
Produced and directed by Jonquil Panting

First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2014.