Word: boccaccio
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...plague-in earlier times called also the Black Death or the Pestilence-has been one of the great wholesale man-killers of history. Ancient Greece and Rome were helpless against it. In the 14th Century it killed 25 million in Europe, probably another 25 million in China and India. Boccaccio used the plague in Florence as a backdrop and excuse for his Decameron; 300 years later Pepys noted in his Diary many a detail of London's famed plague of 1665. One or two cases a year still show...
...Also slighted: Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio, John Wycliffe. *Originally named Red Oaks, renamed by the Colonel after the first real battle of World War I in which U.S. troops (including McCormick) participated...
Actionist Deputy Piero Calamandrei, rector of Florence University, told a Boccaccio-flavored anecdote to express his opposition to the contradictions of a Constitution which proclaimed both religious equality and the preferential position of one faith: "This reminds me of the old man in Florence who had two mistresses, one young and the other old. The man's hair was partly black, partly grey. Each of his mistresses wanted him completely for herself. So the young mistress tore out all his grey hair, while the old one tore out all the black. The poor man's head of course...
...from one of history's great treasure houses, which was a library and a school as well. In the school, the oldest in Christendom, Saint Thomas Aquinas was once a pupil. In the library, which included unique manuscripts of Tacitus, Apuleius and Varro, such Renaissance scholars as Giovanni Boccaccio browsed and pilfered. Adalhard, Charlemagne's cousin, became a monk at Monte Cassino. So did Paul the Deacon, to whom Charlemagne wrote, in a letter, a phrase which epitomizes the abbey: Est nam certa quies fessis venientibus illuc-"For there is certain rest for the weary who come there...
...Hoare-Laval Deal to appease Mussolini (1935) was still fresh. That of the Hitler-sweetening at Munich was even fresher. In 1940 Britain needed someone to talk straight, not sweet, to Spain's Franco. Sir Samuel hardly seemed the man. He had passed "from experience to experience, like Boccaccio's virgin," said a wag, "without discernible effect upon his condition...