Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘The Decameron,’ a group of people end up in a lavish Italian villa while the rest of the country suffers the deadly pestilence that has claimed thousands of lives. Set in the fourteenth century Florence, the story begins with a few noblemen receiving an invitation to move to the safety of Villa Santa, where they can wait out the pestilence. Many invitees are already dead, and the ones who can attend have their own agendas. Then there are the servants, who are trying to survive on their own while tending to the never-ending needs of their masters, who get more insufferable by the day. By the end, the villa transforms every soul inside it, so they all come out of the experience completely changed. Interestingly, the place is just as fictional as its residents. SPOILERS AHEAD
The Fictional Villa Santa was Created in a Studio
Based on the book of the same name by Giovanni Boccaccio, ‘The Decameron’ is an entirely fictional story with made-up characters and a setting that is fabricated to suit the plot. The Villa Santa that serves as the primary location in the series is not a real place but was created in the studios on soundstages for interior locations. For the exterior locations, like the gardens, the crew scouted real locations to make it seem like a part of the fictional Villa Santa.
While it might all seem to be a real villa, Luca Tranchino, the production designer of ‘The Decameron,’ turned towards the Cinecittà Studios to construct separate sections of the villa in three different soundstages. Stage 5 was used to create the more frequently used locations of the villa like the common room where everyone wines and dines every night. This is also where most of the action takes place as the residents of the villa open their doors to newcomers, sometimes welcoming while other times trying to defend their place.
For other portions of the story, like the private rooms of the characters and the kitchen scenes, structures were erected on soundstages 4 and 11. While a lot of action takes place inside the villa, the exteriors, especially the gardens, are just as important. The ones that we see in the show are the gardens of Castello Ruspoli, a sixteenth-century castle in Vignanello. So, while you can’t visit the Villa Santa, you can surely visit its gardens in real life.
All the scenes were then put together such that the different locations seamlessly blended together to make it look like the interiors of one place. In the same vein, the rest of the scenes in the show, outside the villa, were filmed in a mix of soundstages and real locations throughout Italy to give the whole place a feel of the fourteenth century. The effort put into the construction of Villa Santa shows in the way the place emerges as a character of its own, hiding secrets, posing challenges, and serving as an important plot device in changing the course of the story several times.
