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A group of elegant young men and women tell stories and play music in an Italian garden.

A Tale from the Decameron (1916) by John William Waterhouse.

The scene, painted by J.W. Waterhouse, shows people sheltered in a secluded villa outside Florence hoping to escape the Black Plague of 1348-1353.

The plague killed between 40,000 and 60,000 citizens of Florence, about half of the population.

Decamerone by Raffaello Sorbi

What better way to pass the time in quarantine than to tell stories? 

Decameron X.7: How Liza Loved the King, by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1890

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) uses the framing idea for telling tales of wit, eroticism, practical jokes, and life lessons. E. Blair Leighton's painting shows:

"Lisa is the daughter of the apothecary Bernando Puccini. Lisa saw King Pietro of Aragon from a distance and fell in love with him, becoming deathly ill as a consequence. The tale was retold in the 19th century by George Eliot (1869) and Charles Algernon Swinburne, among others." (Source: Columbia University.)

Lauretta, one of the narrators of the Decameron,
painted by Jules Joseph Lefebvre

The Decameron is one of the masterpieces of early Italian literature, written in the vernacular. The stories were inspired by Dante's Inferno and in turn inspired Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella)
(1848-49), oil on canvas, 103 x 142.8 cm,

One of the stories, Lorenzo and Isabella, involved infidelity, murder, and a severed head buried in a pot of basil. Read more online in Flowerpot's Grisly Secret.



There are a few free long-form readings in English. (Link to video) and you can get good English translations in print, such as The Decameron (Penguin Classics) 

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More at Wikipedia on The Decameron.
Columbia University website: Historical Context for The Decameron by Boccaccio.