(1971; Italian) Based on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-cenutry collection of ribald folk and fairy tales - the title "The Ten Days" refers to the period of time in which three young men and seven maids, briefly escaping from the plague in Florence, amuse themselves with fanciful stories - though director/writer Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinema of ironic vignettes of concupiscent comedy (the first of a series, followed by The Canterbury Tales and A Thousand and One Nights) makes no mention of the original framework, using instead the vision of artist Allievo di Giotto (cleverly played by Pasolini) as he and his assistants paint a mural inside the church.

At the outset, without explanation, Ciappelletto (Franco Citti) kills someone and tosses the body over a cliff. (We'll come back to him later.) Coming to Naples to purchase horses, Andreuccio (Ninetto Davoli) of Perugia falls into a trap when he's summoned by a pretty woman who informs him that he's her brother, telling him of how their father fell in love with a rich widow in Palermo. Escaping after falling into the toilet (a pit of shit), robbed of his money and clothing, he falls in with a pair of grave robbers, who force him by threats to climb into the sarcophagus of the recently dead archbishop to steal the late prelate's rich raiment and a valuable ruby ring, but this time Andreuccio's determined not to be burned twice.

After hearing an account of a nearby convent of nuns, another young man - the transitions between tales is abrupt - pretending to be a deaf-mute simpleton, becomes the convent's gardener. Two curious (wondering if what they've heard, that a man can give a woman the greatest pleasure, is true) young nuns ("You and me only, everyday. It's heaven!") believing the gardener won't be able to speak of lying with them, entice him into fornication. But when the other conventuals observe what's going on, they demand his services as well. Seeing the exhausted gardener lying exposed, the mother superior, pulling him into a hut for a rutting, instead receives his complaint that one cock for ten hens is too much labor. She pronounces that with his utterance and understanding a miracle has occurred.

The characters and events have a crudeness (including several scenes of nudity with exposed genitals, including a man's erect penis) and amateurishness appropriate for depicting the time and place. Caught with a man in her house when her jealous husband returns unexpectedly, the wife says she's sold a large pot to a man of means; while the cuckolded husband scrapes out the inside of the large vessel (it needs cleaning), the wife's lover employs his tool inside the adulteress.

A sinful, troublesome son Ciappelletto sent north to collect debts for his father falls ill; his two male hosts, concerned about being held accountable for his death, call for a priest to take confession from the dying man. Ciappelletto's deathbed admissions of his sins are so trivial, astonishing the priest, that he's regarded as a saint by the townsfolk before his burial.

Through contrasts in appearances (people with bad or missing teeth), clothing, living quarters, amusements, and festivities, the film distinguishes the social classes. Promising to sleep outside on the terrace if he's daring enough to climb the wall, Caterina conspires with Riccardo, the son of a wealthy family, for a tryst while her parents sleep; she catches her nightingale.

When Elisabette's three brothers shamefully (a stain on their honor) learn of her sleeping with Lorenzo, a Sicilian apprentice employed on their large estate, they stealthily dispatch him. Seeking their permission to leave the residence with her maid, she recovers Lorenzo's body, removing just his head, which she plants inside a potted basil; as a spirit he appears to her, asking her not to thinking further of him.

Returning from a journey together, Pieto invites Don Gianni to spend the night in his stable, though originally Pieto had offered his bed with his young wife's going to spend the night with Zita, a neighbor, but she is celebrating her wedding. No matter says Don Gianni since he has the magical means of transforming his mare into a woman at night. Intrigued, Pieto's wife Gemmata urges her husband to ask his guest to show them how this can be done since she could serve her husband more profitably as both horse and helpmate. After listening to their begging him to disclose his method, Don Gianni agrees on condition that Pieto say nothing, no matter what he sees in front of his eyes. Telling Gemmata to disrobe, he says that the hardest part is pinning the tail on.

Two friends, sinful Tingoccio, who beds several women daily, and pious Meuccio, determined to be without mortal sin in order to achieve salvation, agree that whoever dies first will return to tell the other what death is like. Tingoccio dies first, the result, Meuccio assumes, of his flagrant indulgence in fornication; his spirit reveals to Meuccio the many punishments sinners must endure in the afterlife, but as for his own debauchery: "that sin doesn't count here."

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