The Decameron

The next storyteller is Panfilo. An amorous and disreputable priest falls in love with a poor married woman called Monna Belcolore. She asks for money to sleep with the priest as she wants to “call at the pawnbroker’s” (852) to retrieve a set of clothing she recently pawned, so that she will have something to wear to church. The priest does not have a way to immediately access the money. Instead, he offers her the cloak from his back as a down payment. She accepts it as a suitable price to pay and the couple have sex. Afterward, the priest thinks of ways he can get his cloak back “without having to pay” (854). He waits for her husband to return and then pretends that he exchanged the cloak for a mortar. She is furious but cannot say anything in front of her husband. She hands back the cloak and sends the priest an aggrieved message. Eventually, they make peace.

The next storyteller is Elissa. Calandrino is a Florentine painter with a reputation for being not particularly intelligent. One day, he hears a conversation in which a man talks about special, magical stones. Calandrino interrupts the man and asks where these stones can be acquired. The man, named Maso del Saggio, has already planned for Calandrino to overhear him as part of an elaborate “practical joke” (856). He tricks Calandrino by saying that the “very magical” (858) stones are called heliotropes. These heliotropes can only be found in the Mugnone River. Anyone who picks up the magical stones will immediately turn invisible.

Fetching his more intelligent friends, Buffalmacco and Bruno, Calandrino goes to the Mugnone River. He plans to use his powers of invisibility to steal from wealthy people, such as merchants and bankers, so that they can “become the richest men in Florence” (859). When Calandrino takes stones from the bottom of the river, his friends decide to pull a prank on him. They insist that they are “unable to see him” (862) when he holds the stones. Even as they walk back to the nearby town, they pretend that Calandrino is invisible. They throw rocks, pretending that they are aiming at empty air but “stoning Calandrino in this fashion” (863). Desperate for the invisibility to be true, Calandrino stays quiet. By the time the group gets back to the town, the two friends have already convinced others to play along. The guards at the gate ignore Calandrino as though he were invisible. Only when Calandrino returns home and his wife Tessa greets him does the prank run into problems. However, Calandrino blames his wife for breaking the spell. He beats her until she is “bruised and battered all over from head to foot” (864). Buffalmacco and Bruno tell their friend the truth and tell him off for beating his innocent wife, though they are highly entertained by the trick.

The next storyteller is Emilia. In Fiesole, a “haughty and presumptuous” (868) old priest falls for an attractive young widow. Though the widow has no interest in the priest, she is worried that insulting him will somehow be an insult to God. He continues to harass and pester her, so she decides to take action. After inviting the priest to her house, she pays her maid Ciutazza—who has “the ugliest and most misshapen face” (870) to sleep with the priest. At the same time, she sends her brothers to fetch the local bishop. When the bishop arrives, he sees the priest in a compromising situation “with Ciutazza in his arms” (872). The rumor of the scandal quickly spreads through the town and the priest is disgraced.

The next storyteller is Filostrato. Niccola is a foolish judge who is famous for his “curious and witless appearance” (875). A local prankster named Saggio decides to play a joke on Niccola in the court. While Niccola is overseeing a case between two of Saggio’s friends, Saggio plans to pull down Niccola’s pants so that the entire room sees the judge nude from the waist down. Saggio succeeds and slips away without being caught, turning Niccola into a figure of public ridicule.

The next storyteller is Filomena, who returns to the character of Calandrino. One day, Calandrino and his friends Bruno and Buffalmacco decide to visit Calandrino’s pig farm on the outskirts of Florence. Once there, Bruno and Buffalmacco hatch a plot to steal Calandrino’s “very fine pig” (880). They get Calandrino drunk, they steal the slaughtered pig, and then insist that the drunken Calandrino was the real thief. When Calandrino protests, the two others organize a method to check who is lying. They manufacture “the best ginger sweets” (883) which are incredibly bitter and, when Calandrino finds them “intolerable” (885), they use this as evidence that he is lying. They use this information to blackmail Calandrino, threatening to tell his wife that he has stolen a pig unless he gives them several chickens. Bruno and Buffalmacco depart with the chickens and the pig, “leaving Calandrino to scratch his head and rue his losses” (886).

The next storyteller is Pampinea. After the death of her husband, Elena searches for a new romantic partner. Among the prospects is a man named Rinieri, who she treats badly as she visits other men and “in this fashion she toyed with him for some little time” (889). Eventually, Rinieri is tired of being mistreated and “duped” (894). He is given “a chance to gratify his longing for revenge” (895) against Elena when she asks him for help in dealing with a previous lover who rejected her. He agrees to help, but he demands that she complete several tasks which are designed to punish her in cruel and inventive ways, such as climbing to the top of a local tower while wearing no clothes. When Elena is at the top of the tower, Rinieri takes away the ladder. Elena spends so long at the top of the tower without any clothes that she is badly sunburned and suffers from many insect bites. She weeps and repents “the wrong she had done, as well as the excessive trust she had placed in someone she had every reason to look upon as her enemy” (901). Rinieri takes the opportunity to insult and criticize Elena at length. Eventually, Rinieri tells Elena’s servant what has happened and Elena comes down from the tower, now “utterly broken and exhausted” (914). After she recovers, she no longer treats anyone in the cruel fashion in which she treated Rinieri.

The next storyteller is Fiammetta. Zeppa lives next door to Spinelloccio. Both the men have attractive wives, though Spinelloccio is in the midst of an illicit romance with Zeppa’s wife. When Zeppa discovers what has happened, he tricks Spinelloccio into coming to his house by telling his wife to invite their neighbor. When Spinelloccio arrives, Zeppa’s wife grabs him and locks him inside a “chest” (919), just as Zeppa planned. Afterward, Zeppa tells his wife to invite Spinelloccio’s wife to their house. When Spinelloccio’s wife arrives, he tells her to sit on “the chest in which her husband [is] confined” (920) while he tells her that her husband has been unfaithful. While Spinelloccio is locked inside the trunk, Zeppa proposes that he and Spinelloccio’s wife have sex as revenge against their unfaithful partners. She agrees and, after they sleep together, Zeppa goes to the trunk and releases Spinelloccio. After this event, all four people come to an arrangement so that they can carry on their affairs in a way that “each of the ladies had two husbands, and each of the men had two wives” (922).

The next storyteller is Lauretta. Bruno and Buffalmacco decide to play a trick on a foolish doctor named Master Simeone, telling him that they are members of a mysterious secret society. When he takes them to dinner to inquire more about the society, he hopes to gain their approval enough that they invite him to join as he is “positively dying to attend” (930). The two men use the doctor’s desire as a way to exploit him for free food and wine. Eventually, they are forced to progress with his initiation. The doctor fails the fake initiation test organized by Bruno and Buffalmacco, so they take him to the outskirts of town and leave “the filth-bespattered doctor” (940) in a ditch. After, Bruno and Buffalmacco go to the doctor’s house. They pretend that they have been injured while trying to defend him to the other members of the society and that they “were very nearly expelled from the very company” (941) into which they were trying to initiate the doctor. Rather than realize that he has been tricked, the doctor takes pity on the two men and takes them out to dinner “on a much more lavish scale than ever before” (942) as a way to apologize.

The final storyteller is Dioneo. Salabaetto is a young and naïve merchant. During a trip to Sicily, he is tricked by a woman named Madonna Jancofiore, who scams him out of a large sum of money. As she is “well versed in the arts of the procuress” (945), she refuses to admit that the money is his and turns him out of her house, offering him only “a string of excuses” (951). Unfortunately for Salabaetto, he borrowed the money from other people. He now owes large sums of money to a series of men. He enlists his friend Pietro—“a man of great intelligence and shrewdness” (952)—to help him sail to Sicily again, whereupon he is able to turn the tables on Jancofiore. He triples his money by turning the scam on her, allowing him to repay his debts.