Prosperine witnesses a rabbit split in two and become two rabbits

Prosperine witnesses a rabbit become two living animals after Ciccolina cuts it in half, an event that turns an ordinary dispute over price and food into an apparent miracle. Recounted by Prosperine to Domenico Tempesta, the episode moves from irritation to astonishment, then to a religious gesture and a shared meal; Pomaricci’s death that same evening adds a dark consequence without explaining the transformation or establishing a causal link.

The dispute over the rabbit

The episode begins during Ciccolina’s usual dealings with Pomaricci. He complains and pokes his fingers through the cages before choosing a rabbit, which he pulls out by the ears and calls a half-dead bag of bones. He asks how much Ciccolina wants for it, objecting that the price should buy twice as much meat as the small animal can provide. Although he protests, he opens his shabby change purse and prepares to pay the price she names. His familiar complaint and readiness to pay make the exchange a recurring contest rather than a straightforward purchase.

Ciccolina is unwell that day, troubled by dizziness and mal di capo. On the walk into town, she has fallen twice against the cart and once in the road; she has also been angry throughout the day. When Pomaricci complains about how little meat the rabbit will yield, she answers that if twice the meat will quiet him, he will get twice the meat. The transformation begins, then, not as a planned display but amid physical discomfort, accumulated irritation, and a quarrel over the value of food.

The transformation and its witnesses

Ciccolina brings the rabbit to the cutting board and tells Prosperine to hold it by its back feet. Prosperine obeys. Ciccolina’s cleaver comes down and divides the animal cleanly in half, narrowly missing Prosperine’s right hand and Ciccolina’s left breast. The near miss marks the action as dangerous even before its impossible result becomes clear; the account describes a real cutting task carried out in anger, not a prepared trick or ceremony.

What follows is the event’s central reversal. The divided rabbit sheds no blood. Instead, each half grows into another half, until the two pieces have become two whole, living rabbits. Prosperine and Pomaricci both witness the change. The literal terms of Pomaricci’s complaint—that one rabbit cannot provide enough meat—are answered in an extraordinary way, but the result does not restore their ordinary understanding of the exchange. It makes the promised abundance inexplicable.

Fear, blessing, and the evening meal

Ciccolina thrusts both rabbits toward Pomaricci and sends him away with them. He drops the coins from his hand, stumbles backward, and runs off screaming about dinner and the devil’s work. The intended transaction collapses: though the schoolmaster had been ready to pay, the uncanny gift frightens him out of accepting it. Prosperine’s account thus gives the rabbits opposite meanings for the two witnesses. Pomaricci retreats from them, while the women remain to face what they have seen.

Ciccolina takes Prosperine by the arm and traces the cross of Jesus Christ on her forehead with her thumb. She urges the stunned girl to say a blessing and make the sign of the cross. Prosperine complies in a kind of trance, but her attention remains fixed on the two rabbits that had been one. Her uncertainty is part of the account: she wonders whether she was dreaming and cannot reconcile what she saw with what she believes possible. The religious gesture does not explain the event; it gives the witnesses an immediate response to it.

That evening the church bell rings for Pomaricci, who has died of apoplexy. The narration places his death after the rabbit episode but does not say that the transformation caused it. Ciccolina and Prosperine, meanwhile, celebrate. Ciccolina orders Prosperine to kill and dress both rabbits. Prosperine initially doubts that she can do so, given what she has witnessed, but she follows the order; she and Ciccolina eat the cooked rabbit with squash from Ciccolina’s garden and bread soaked in tomato gravy. Prosperine remembers the meal as the most delicious food she has ever tasted, a practical feast made possible by the very event that had left her unable to look away.

The tale’s frame and significance

Prosperine tells the story that night to Tempesta and insists on the truth of what she witnessed. Her declaration frames the episode as testimony, not as an independently verified account: the reader receives it through Prosperine’s memory and conviction. The narrative preserves both her bewilderment and her certainty, allowing the miracle to remain unexplained rather than resolving it as dream, fraud, or ordinary occurrence.

The episode also turns a small economic dispute into a story about abundance and its costs. Pomaricci asks for more meat and flees when he receives an impossible surplus; Ciccolina and Prosperine, after fear and hesitation, accept the rabbits as food. The death bell sounds between the schoolmaster’s flight and the women’s feast, placing a confirmed death alongside a transformation whose meaning remains uncertain. The sequence gives the tale its unsettled force: wonder, religious reassurance, mortality, and hunger occupy the same evening, while Prosperine’s remembered meal becomes the concrete ending of an experience she still cannot explain.