Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

Radio 4 Extra,01 Dec 2014,15 mins

Available for 30 days

Terry Jones introduces the first of ten tasty Renaissance tales. The 100 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 14th-century Italy. But their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern, and their subjects - love, fate, sex, religion, morality - are universal. “Luckily, God listens to the sincerity of our prayers, and takes no account of their ignorance…” All is not what it seems, when a 14th-century Tony Soprano makes his deathbed confession. Adapted in ten parts by Robin Brooks Ciappelletto ..... Colin McFarlane Musciatto ..... Sam Dale Holy Friar ..... Michael Bertenshaw Federico ..... Monty d’Inverno Anselmo ..... Paul Heath Doctor ..... Ian Conningham 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.

Programme Website
More episodes