Novelle illustrate

Novelle illustrate is my master's degree project in communication design at the Politecnico di Milano. The picture book is the result of an intersemiotic translation of the first day of the Decameron (1353), written by Giovanni Boccaccio. The aim is to spread Italian literature by promoting new models of rewriting and translation to appeal to both young and adult readers. The typography is hand-drawn and the binding is hand-sewn. An internal foldout serves as an index of the ten novellae and representation of Boccaccio's entire oeuvre, highlighting the complexity of the project and inviting the reader to delve deeper. Each novella is illustrated in a defined two-tone colour scheme. All illustrations are hand-drawn and inspired by the pictorial and sculptural art of the Italian and European Renaissance. The creation process involved reading and understanding the original work, translating the ten novellas of the first day into modern Italian, synthesising the novellas into salient events and then into text strings, illustrating them and finally merging everything on the page.