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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

Radio 3

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.

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

Giovanni Boccaccio

Robin Brooks

Robert Hollingworth

Paula Chateauneuf

Michael Bertenshaw

Geoffrey Streatfield

Paul Ritter

Louise Brealey

Jude Akuwudike

Shaun Mason

Jonquil Panting

The Essay: Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio: Episode 7: The Wager

Drama: Classic & Period

Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio

Episode 7

Episode 7: The Wager

The Wager

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Decameron Nights: Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio, The Wager

Terry Jones introduces a retelling from The Decameron. A casual bet changes three lives.

When a man makes a bet on his wife's chastity and his friend sets out to prove him wrong, neither man imagines the matter will change their lives forever. Introduced by Terry Jones.

Terry Jones introduces another tasty Renaissance tale, starring Louise Brealey in a sly tale of about a costly bet.

The one hundred stories which make up Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece, come from all over the world. 

They are vividly reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes in the cities of Renaissance 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, and introduced by Terry Jones. 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: "Those who after misadventures, find unexpected happiness."

When Bernabo makes a bet on his wife's chastity, and his friend sets out to prove him wrong, neither man imagines the matter will change their lives forever.


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.

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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