He told him about... the sounds and smells of the countryside and how fresh and clean everything is in the countryside. She said he should live there and that if he did, he would find out that all his troubles were the city's problems. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)Rural areas in Western literature are pure and good, dating back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis. They represent spirituality, beauty, and often an escape from the problems of a sinful world. In Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, the citizens of Florence flee their plague-ridden city for the solitude and safety of the countryside. In the Confessions of St. Augustine, the narrator has his most significant spiritual awakening in a garden in Milan. At the beginning of the Decameron, Boccaccio describes the plague that struck Florence: Large quantities of waste were carried away from the city by specially appointed officials. , entry to all sick people was prohibited and numerous instructions were given to safeguard people's health, but all to no avail. (I. Intro)This passage describes the vast presence of sin in the city. "Officials" can be interpreted to mean clergy, "sick" can mean criminals, and "numerous instructions" can mean church work. “All in vain,” however, signifies the continued presence of sin and ugliness in the city despite the church's efforts. Several young citizens of Florence, however, meet in a church and then leave physically, on a trip to the countryside, which is, above all, "a certain distance from any road". (I. Introduction) There, the young men and their beautiful companions strolled slowly through a garden, conversing on pleasant subjects, weaving beautiful garlands for each other from the leaves of various trees, and singing love songs. (I. Intro) Words like "beautiful", "pleasant" and especially "love" are in stark contrast to previous descriptions of Florence. The vision of "young men and their beautiful companions" conversing is pure and chaste, somehow pre-lapsarian. Emphasis is placed on natural aspects by mentioning "garden", "garlands" and "leaves of various trees". In the introduction to the Third Day, the new garden they arrive in is directly compared to the Garden of Eden: Everyone begins to argue that if Paradise were built on earth, it would not be conceivable that it could take any other form, nor could they imagine in any way in which the beauty of the garden could be improved. In this passage, Boccaccio seems to affirm that Paradise is actually reachable on earth and that the countryside is the manifestation of human perfection. The beauty found in the description of the garden seems almost impossibly perfect, but Boccaccio claims it is real. The perfect garden is created even without God's help in the fifth story of the tenth day. In this story, Dianora asks Ansaldo for a May garden in January, which he believes is impossible. Ansaldo, however, enlists the help of a magician, who creates "one of the most beautiful gardens anyone has ever seen, with plants, trees and fruit of every type imaginable". The description is almost exactly that of the gardens in the narrative frame. The creation of a garden without divine intervention demonstrates once again Boccaccio's religious skepticism, which pervades his vigorous text. While the characters of the Decameron can exist in the garden that symbolizes human perfection without ruining it, St. Augustine, in his Confessions, fails to do so. In Book II, Augustine steals a pear from a tree in a vineyard: The fruit we stole was beautiful because it was the.