Word: decameron
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...Milan's world première of the Italian cinema's long-anticipated Boccaccio '70-they burst forth, some with catcalls and derisive whistles, others with cheers. Produced by Carlo Ponti, husband of Sophia Loren, Boccaccio '70 tells four stories. None derive from the Decameron that Giovanni Boccaccio wrote six centuries ago, but they are designed as modern reflections of Boccaccio's lusty humanism, and the '70 of the title is a wild hope that the film will still be running eight years from now. Judged on the collected talent alone, it would seem...
Published 500 years ago "as an aid and comfort to women in love," Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron reputedly contains every basic plot ever written. It has provided aid and comfort for novelists, short story writers, dramatists, Hollywood and TV hacks. Now Boccaccio has been set to the dance. At Italy's Nervi Festival, Russian-born Choreographer Leonide Massine last week presented the premiere of his Human Comedy, a three-hour interpretation of nine of Boccaccio's lustiest tales...
...saintly Moon Lady, separated from her pious young son by invading Tartars, is hustled offstage before she can become tiresome. Her place is taken by a crew of thieves, usurers, pimps and powder faces (prostitutes) who add up to a kind of road-company Decameron. The fat lecher Pi, for instance, lusts after the beautiful Silver Vase, a pubescent virgin being carefully tended by Lady Li, a flower-garden proprietor (brothelkeeper). Cash-and-Carry, a young wastrel, volunteers to act as go-between, but what he goes between are Silver Vase's sheets. Lady Li, who has been giving...
Giovanni (Decameron] Boccaccio, whose medieval priests seemed seldom far from a girl or a glass, would have been surprised at what happened to the Rev. Lino Gussoni in Rome last week. Born and raised in Italy but a longtime U.S. citizen. Father Gussoni. 39, was on leave from a welfare post in New York City's archdiocese, living in Rome for his health (a throat condition). After dinner with three lay friends from the U.S., he dropped in for a nightcap at a relatively unexciting nightspot, Club 84. "We're all Americans," said one of them. "We didn...
...turned out a masterful and hilarious cock-and-ball story. Like the fabliaux, the play is "mosts pour la gent faire rire"; it embodies the English version of l'esprit gaulois. Merry Wives certainly joins the company of the other classic representatives of the fabliau tradition--Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. So cease, ye carpers...