Domenico is forced to leave the seminary and become a stonemason

Domenico is forced to leave the seminary and become a stonemason after a scandal involving his youngest brother, Vincenzo, costs Nardo his position and access to the magistrate’s estate. The episode turns a household dispute into a reversal of Domenico’s future: his father sacrifices a prized gold medallion to reinstate Nardo, but Nardo will not accept Vincenzo back, so Domenico is taken from his priestly studies and made the substitute apprentice. In Domenico Onofrio Tempesta’s account, the change is both a personal defeat and an enactment of the family rule that a father’s command overrides a son’s vocation.

The scandal at the estate

Nardo is supervising the construction of a new courtyard and vineyard wall. One hot afternoon, after his noon meal, he falls asleep in the shade. Left unsupervised, Vincenzo takes the opportunity to run away from his work. At the estate, the magistrate is showing a visiting monsignor from Calabria around the grounds when the two men hear groaning from an arbor and hurry toward it, expecting to find someone hurt.

Instead, they find Vincenzo with his trousers down, engaged in a lewd act with the magistrate’s unmarried daughter, who is twice his age. The visiting monsignor is so shocked that he nearly faints. The magistrate’s shouts wake Nardo, who arrives before Vincenzo has even calmed down and buttoned his trousers. The public discovery makes Nardo answer for an apprentice’s conduct: the magistrate fires him immediately and banishes both Nardo and Vincenzo from the property, expressing the wish that Mount Etna’s molten eruption would drown him before he saw either man again.

The episode’s comic, humiliating exposure has practical consequences. Nardo loses his place on the building project, while Vincenzo’s behavior makes his own return to it impossible. The unfinished courtyard and vineyard wall remain the setting for the dispute’s aftermath: the work that had been proceeding under Nardo becomes the work to which Domenico himself will be assigned.

Nardo’s demand and the medallion

Nardo does not wait until his usual Saturday report to confront Domenico’s father. He storms along the road from the village toward the mines and shouts for him into the gorge. As Pasquale later tells the story, Nardo demands the money he says he has lost. Domenico’s father answers that he cannot pay the sum Nardo claims. Nardo then insults him by arguing that a fancy gold medallion cannot, by itself, make a man honorable. Pasquale is standing beside his father and hears the accusation.

Domenico frames the insult through a code of honor: for his father, and for a Sicilian, an accusation against one’s honor wounds more deeply than a blow to the body. Yet the inability to pay remains real; his father cannot simply produce the money Nardo demands. The conflict is therefore not resolved by answering the insult in kind. Instead, the father approaches the magistrate with a jug of his best Malaga and the treasured gold medallion. By the time the jug is empty, he has handed over the possession he values most so that Nardo can be reinstated as the magistrate’s mason.

The payment repairs Nardo’s standing with the magistrate but does not restore the original arrangement. Nardo refuses to take Vincenzo back. His refusal determines which son will bear the cost of the family’s attempt to settle the matter: not the apprentice whose conduct triggered the scandal, but Domenico, whose studies and future are available to his father’s decision.

From religious studies to masonry

Against his mother’s protests and the village priest’s objections, Domenico is pulled out of his priestly studies and sent back to Giuliana. He is ordered to work beside Nardo on the unfinished courtyard, beginning an apprenticeship he does not choose. The father’s arrangement answers the immediate practical problem created by Nardo’s refusal, but it makes Domenico the replacement for Vincenzo in the work rather than allowing either the interrupted studies or the failed apprenticeship to resume as before.

Domenico describes his obedience as compulsory: he has no choice but to honor the arrangement his father has made. He gives the command a broader formulation, presenting a father’s word as a son’s law. The maxim makes the decision more than a change of occupation. Domenico’s religious education, which he had pursued before being recalled to work, is subordinated to paternal authority and the family’s concern with honor and obligation.

Over the following months, Domenico changes physically as well as socially. His hands grow rough, and heavy lifting strengthens the muscles in his arms and chest. He hates masonry with all his heart and longs to return to his studies. The bodily effects of the apprenticeship thus register what the decision has done: the scholar is being remade through labor he resents, while the desire to resume his former path remains unresolved.

Narrative significance

The episode is shaped as a chain of substitutions. Vincenzo’s escape from work and scandalous behavior cost Nardo his position; the father’s gold medallion secures Nardo’s reinstatement; Nardo’s refusal to employ Vincenzo sends Domenico into the work instead. Each attempted repair transfers the burden rather than restoring what was lost. Nardo gets his job back, but the household does not return to its prior arrangement, and Domenico pays for the settlement with the interruption of his studies.

Domenico’s narration also places honor beside material limits. His father regards Nardo’s accusation as an assault on family standing, yet cannot answer the demand with money. The medallion becomes the concrete price of restoring Nardo’s place, and the father’s decision then turns Domenico’s labor into a further payment. The event therefore establishes the force of paternal command in Domenico’s account while showing its cost: a son’s vocation can be displaced to preserve an arrangement made in the name of family honor.