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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio

Robin Brooks

Robert Hollingworth

Paula Chateauneuf

John Finnemore

Ingrid Oliver

Carrie Quinlan

Shaun Mason

Adam Thomas Wright

Jonquil Panting

The Essay: Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio: Episode 2: Federigo and His Falcon

Drama: Classic & Period

Episode 2

Episode 2: Federigo and His Falcon

Federigo and His Falcon

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio, Federigo and His Falcon

Terry Jones introduces a retelling from The Decameron about a lovelorn man's quest.

Courtly Federigo spends every last groat trying to win the affections of Monna. But there is only one thing of his that she wants - and it has feathers. Introduced by Terry Jones.

Terry Jones introduces another tasty Renaissance tale, starring John Finnemore as a lovelorn knight.

The one hundred 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 world 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. 

Radio 3 is retelling ten of these choice Florentine Fancies, adapted from Boccaccio by Robin Brooks. Like the original, our stories are told over ten days, each of which has its own theme. You can hear them every evening in the Essay, and in omnibus form on Sunday evenings in Drama on 3.

The music for the series is arranged and performed by Robert Hollingworth, Director of I Fagiolini, and the lutenist Paula Chateauneuf, with translations by Silvia Reseghetti. The script consultant is Guyda Armstrong.

Today's theme is "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.


Giovanni Boccaccio was born to a Florentine banking family in 1313. After an unsuccessful start in law, he turned to his true love: poetry. A humanist and a pupil of Petrarch, Boccaccio's Latin poetry was famous across Europe, and provided the sources for his near-contemporary Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and The Knight's Tale. But his real innovation was the vibrant, vernacular prose in which he wrote The Decameron. Beautifully realised in the teeming voices of merchants and prostitutes, knights and nuns, shopkeepers and conmen, these one hundred stories have become a bedrock of our storytelling tradition, mined ever since by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Lope de Vega, Christine de Pizan, Swift, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Caryl Churchill and many more.

The Essay: Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Terry Jones introduces a series of retellings of stories from Boccaccio's The Decameron

Terry Jones introduces a series of retellings of stories from Boccaccio's The Decameron, adapted by Robin Brooks

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Episode 2: Federigo and His Falcon

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