Decameron, collection of tales by Giovanni Boccaccio, probably composed between 1349 and 1353. The work is regarded as a masterpiece of classical Italian prose. While romantic in tone and form, it breaks from medieval sensibility in its insistence on the human ability to overcome, even exploit, fortune.

Pasolini's rendition of 8 of Boccaccio's tales. Includes lusty nuns who perform sexual "miracles," a cheating wife with a head for business, a dying con artist attempting a heavenly swindle, young lovers caught with their pants down, a servant who loses his head for love and a gullible farmer who tries to turn his wife into a mare.

Boccaccio's classic tales of passion brought to the screen with all their lusty fervor intact. Among the stories are a young man's exploits with a gang of robbers, a flock of randy nuns who sin with a strapping gardener, and a pupil of the painter Giotto working on a massive fresco.

The Decameron, transposed to Naples from Boccaccio's Florence, is a cutting takedown of the pieties surrounding religion and sex. The Arabian nights follows the adventures of a slave girl as she rises to power over a great city. Around her revolve the stories of magic and lust, mystery and fantasy that derive from three cultures (Persia, Egypt and India) and range from the ninth century to the Renaissance. In the Canterbury tales, Pasolini's startling...

16 tales read from Boccaccio's answer to Dante's Divine comedy.

Four directors tell tales of Eros fit for a 1970s Decameron. Working-class lovers, Renzo and Luciana, marry but must hide it from her employer; plus they need a room of their own. A billboard of Anita Ekberg provocatively selling milk gives a prudish crusader for public decency more than he can handle. The wife of a count whose escapades with call girls make the front page of the papers decides to work to prove her independence, but what is she qualified...

Pasolini's rendering of several of Chaucer's tales of romance, deception, murder, and lust, told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral during the Middle Ages. The middle film of Pasolini's thematic "Trilogy of Life," the other two films being Decameron and Arabian Nights.