A 700-year-old story – Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written and set in Italy at the time of the Black Death – is having its day again. During the Covid pandemic, it became a Twitter trend, a favourite of virtual book clubs, and was hailed as the text “of the moment” by Vogue. This summer, a “soapy period dramedy” adaptation is coming to Netflix, promising to take “viewers back into quarantine”.