NEW YORK, NY.- “The Decameron,” a new limited series, opens in Florence, Italy, in 1348. As bells toll peacefully over the rooftops, a raven lands on a window ledge, and peers around inquisitively before being struck by a stone hurled by a young boy as he yells, “Food.” The raven splats to the ground, dead, not far from the body of a shoeless man, also dead. “Mom, I got a chicken,” the boy calls out. Cheery music announces a title card: “The Black Plague.”

This darkly funny scene sets the tone for the show, which arrives on Netflix July 25. Loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century book of the same name, the show’s eight episodes tell the story of a group of nobles who attempt to escape the plague by taking refuge in a villa, some with their servants.

Setting a dramedy during one of the most devastating periods in human history, estimated to have wiped out up to half of Europe’s population, might not seem like the most obvious choice, especially coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, which also killed millions around the world.

But on the “Decameron” set in Rome in March last year, the cast and crew appeared to be having a lot of fun.

“It’s been probably too fun,” said the British actor Tanya Reynolds, who plays one of the villa guests. “I feel like every night I go home and my actual torso aches, my ribs hurt because I’ve been laughing so much.”

Saoirse-Monica Jackson, of “Derry Girls” fame, compared the long working days to a “lockdown of sorts,” because the cast had been so immersed in the project. “But I’m really enjoying it. It’s like a perfect tonic of brilliant, hilarious people,” said Jackson, who plays one of the servants.

“It’s been full on,” said the American actor Zosia Mamet, who plays a noblewoman and described being “immersed in the little bubble of this intense marathon of making our show.”

The cast is diverse, both in terms of race and accent. The producers wanted to “build a world that felt a little bit more universal, so that we could all see ourselves in the story a little bit easier,” said Kathleen Jordan, the showrunner. Characters speak a hybrid of archaic English and modern turns of phrase to create a “foot-in-each-world kind of feeling,” Jordan said.

Set against the background of the Black Death, Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” tells of 10 characters who take refuge in a villa outside Florence, in the “beautiful, not infected countryside,” (an episode title), and wile away the evenings by swapping tales.

Boccaccio’s narrative frame inspired the series, but the similarities pretty much end there. “I think an Italian medievalist will be disappointed if they come to this show expecting to see their favorite Decameron stories depicted,” Jordan said in an interview on set. The cast was told that reading the hefty book (an English translation can run to more than 1,000 pages) was optional.

Jordan’s initial idea for the show came “pretty early on in the pandemic,” she said, after witnessing various instances of “tone deafness in celebrity culture” that demonstrated how out of touch and disconnected people could be. In a moment when people were dying and frontline responders were struggling, some celebrities complained they felt as though they were in prison in their multimillion-dollar mansions. “It was so irritating and frustrating for me,” she recalled.

So she set out to write something “inspired by that moment” that showed, as the coronavirus pandemic had, the “chasm between the haves and the have-nots.”

To write a show “about class disparity without it being sort of preachy,” Jordan said she coupled some of Boccaccio’s nobles with their servants to tell a broader tale that explores class, democracy, privilege, servitude and emancipation.

Throughout the show, the servants must put up with the often excessive demands of their “padroni,” or masters. In one scene, Tony Hale, who plays Sirisco, the steward of the villa, tells another character about the “true terrors” of his job. “People corner you at all hours of the night about nothing. Nothing. ‘Sirisco, my wrist hurts. Can you spread my cheese?’” he recounts, his anger mounting. Mamet’s character bullies Jackson’s mercilessly.

“That’s where that all began, with the distance between the upstairs and the downstairs folks,” said Jordan, who previously worked on the shows “American Princess” and “Teenage Bounty Hunters,” which, like “The Decameron,” was co-produced by Jenji Kohan (“Orange Is the New Black.”)

While Jordan said she had a childhood obsession with the bubonic plague, her “Decameron” is also a soapy tale of romance and intrigue that delivers edge-of-your-seat plot twists involving socially enlightened peasants, bandits and religious fanatics, with the stakes for each character rising every episode. “It becomes a bit ‘Lord of the Flies,’” Reynolds said.

While crafting the show, the writers watched the reality show “Survivor” together, Jordan said, “because ultimately this show is about survival,” as well as grappling with the transience of life, as so many did during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Kathleen and the writers did such a beautiful job of touching upon what we just went through without being didactic, which is really difficult, you know? I don’t think we want our metaphors to be heavy handed,” said Andrew DeYoung, who directed episodes 3 and 4. “I think the message is quite beautifully buried in the writing,” he said, adding that it was one of the “most fun” projects he’d ever worked on (there’s that fun again).

Viewers may find some of the offbeat moments about trying to survive a pandemic relatable. In an early scene, Reynolds’ character, Licisca, puts flowers in her nostrils to prevent bad air from entering the body, explaining that it is widely known that pestilence is cursed air released from hell by earthquakes.

Hale saw this as the medieval equivalent of washing groceries and plastic bags at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. “Obviously, down the road, we realized that’s not part of it, but initially you’re like, I don’t know — if somebody says it on the news, you’re like, OK, let’s do that,” he said.

The show was shot over 22 weeks in Italy, mostly between the Cinecittà studios and a storied villa near Viterbo, an area north of Rome. The villa, originally a medieval castle, as well as walks through ancient Rome, helped Hale “get into the frame of what they went through, and just the absolute devastation of the plague, because they didn’t have the advancements that we have now.”

Netflix declined to disclose the series’ budget, but the costume designers said it was generous enough to pay for hand-stitched clothing made of high-end French fabrics, some decorated with expensive Japanese trimmings. “They are amazing,” said Gabriella Pescucci, who designed the costumes with Uliva Pizzetti.

An elaborate set was built inside the Teatro 5, the storied stage where the late director Federico Fellini held court and filmed some of his best known works, including the 1976 “Casanova,” starring Donald Sutherland, who died last month.

Luca Tranchino, the “Decameron” production designer, said he was inspired by “Casanova” while designing a secret mirror-lined room in the villa. The other sets were designed after painstaking research to achieve historical accuracy.

“The Decameron” was “an ideal project” for a designer, “because you’re imagining a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. Painstaking care was paid to details on set, including the candles, which were made with the dark wax, typically used in the Middle Ages, that casts a moody light.

Going against cinematic type, Tranchino’s Middle Ages are not washed in muted tones of brown and gray, but are instead livelier, based on painted depictions found in frescoes and manuscripts from the era.

“It was a world full of culture, not a dark age,” Tranchino said, and this was reflected in the set, with some stylization, so the contemporary audience could relate to the characters’ experiences. So while he took liberties with historical accuracy, the “spirit is truthful to the age,” he added.

Sitting in a dark tent-like structure on set, Jordan watched take after take of a pivotal scene in her show: a crescendo of action that propels the characters into progressive chaos. Suddenly, swords are brandished and a drunken brawl leads to the death of a minor character.

“It’s so dark,” Jordan said. “I love it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.