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,02 Dec 2014,15 mins

Available for 30 days

Terry Jones introduces another tasty Renaissance tale. 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 fourteenth-century Italy. But their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern, and their subjects - love, fate, sex, religion, morality - are universal. “Lovers who, after many disasters, finally find happiness.” Courtly Federigo spends every last groat trying to win the affections of the beautiful Monna. But there is only one thing of his that she wants. And it has feathers. Federigo degli Alberighi ..... John Finnemore Monna ..... Ingrid Oliver Elena ..... Carrie Quinlan Beppo ..... Shaun Mason Niccolo ..... Adam Thomas Wright 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.

Programme Website
More episodes