Bartolomea is taken by Paganino da Mare while at sea with her husband, Ricciardo di Chinzica, but the decisive turn comes when she refuses to return to him. The episode makes a corsair’s seizure the beginning of a pointed reversal: Ricciardo’s rigid calendar has denied his young wife a fulfilling marriage, while Paganino offers the intimacy and companionship she says she was owed. When Ricciardo finally arrives to ransom her, Bartolomea speaks for herself, rejects his appeal to family honor, and chooses to remain. After Ricciardo’s death, she and Paganino marry.

Marriage and Confinement

Ricciardo is a wealthy judge in Pisa, clever in legal matters but, as the story presents him, poorly matched to the bodily demands of a young wife. He has diligently sought a beautiful bride and marries Bartolomea, the daughter of Messer Lotto Gualandi, with great ceremony. On their wedding night, his frailty makes their first attempt at consummation nearly a failure; the following day he has to restore himself with malmsey, restorative confections, and other remedies.

After that beginning, Ricciardo devises a calendar that places much of the year beyond marital intimacy. He tells Bartolomea that saints’ days, fasts, Ember Days, apostolic vigils, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Lent, lunar phases, and other observances require abstinence. The calendar is his invention, not a shared religious discipline: he uses it to restrict his wife while keeping close watch lest another man teach her which days might be working days. Bartolomea says he visits her perhaps once a month, if even that. The joke rests on the mismatch between his exacting command of the law and his evasion of the ordinary obligations of marriage.

The Seizure at Sea

During hot weather, Ricciardo takes Bartolomea to his country estate near Monte Nero, intending to spend several days there. To entertain her, he arranges a fishing excursion in two boats. He travels in one with the fishermen; Bartolomea is in another with a group of women. The boats drift some distance offshore as the passengers attend to their sport, and a galliot commanded by the famous corsair Paganino da Mare comes upon them.

Paganino overtakes the boat carrying the women and takes Bartolomea aboard. Ricciardo has reached land and sees her carried away, but he cannot stop the corsair or learn where he is taking her. His complaints in Pisa and elsewhere bring no result: he does not know who seized his wife or where she has gone. Paganino, who has no wife and finds Bartolomea beautiful, decides to keep her. At first she weeps, and he tries to comfort her with gentle words. When night comes, however, his calendar of holy days has no place in their new life. The story makes the contrast unmistakable: with Paganino, Bartolomea soon forgets Ricciardo’s rules and begins to live cheerfully. He takes her to Monaco and treats her honorably as his wife.

The Failed Ransom

After learning where Bartolomea is, Ricciardo goes to Monaco, prepared to spend whatever is necessary to ransom her. Bartolomea tells Paganino that her husband has arrived and explains her own intention. Paganino receives Ricciardo with apparent civility but pretends not to know either him or Bartolomea. He says he will bring the visitor to the woman and return her only if she identifies him as her husband and wishes to leave; in that case, Ricciardo may offer whatever ransom he thinks appropriate. If she does not choose to go, Paganino will not surrender her.

When Bartolomea appears, dressed and composed, she greets Ricciardo as though he were a stranger. He is astonished, supposing that grief or some change in his appearance has made her fail to recognize him. She confirms the truth only after Paganino permits them to speak alone. Then she explains that Ricciardo had understood her poorly when they were together: she was young, energetic, and desirous of the intimacy their marriage lacked. She mocks his devotion to cataloguing saints’ days and fasts, comparing the days he allowed her in bed with holidays so numerous that the farmers working his land could scarcely have reaped a crop if held to the same rule.

Bartolomea contrasts her former life in Pisa with the one she has found in Monaco. Under Ricciardo’s roof, she says, she felt more like his whore than his wife; with Paganino, she is held in his arms and treated as a partner. Ricciardo argues that she should care for her family’s honor, warns that Paganino may tire of her, and promises to try to satisfy her from now on. Bartolomea answers that he has begun to value her honor only when it can no longer secure her return. Her relatives did not protect that honor when they gave her to Ricciardo, she says, and she will not sacrifice her present happiness to preserve it for them.

Her refusal is not limited to choosing between the two men at that moment. Even if Paganino were to dismiss her, she says, she would not return to Ricciardo; she would seek her advantage elsewhere. When Ricciardo presses her to reconsider, she threatens to cry out if he tries to force her. He leaves without accomplishing his purpose. The attempted ransom thus becomes a judgment on the marriage he had presumed could be recovered with money and promises: Bartolomea’s testimony, not his claim of possession, determines where she will live.

Marriage and Comic Reversal

Ricciardo returns to Pisa distressed and defeated. For a time, whenever anyone greets him or asks him a question, he can answer only with the saying that the ill hole will have no holidays. The phrase reduces his elaborate religious calendar to a bitter reminder of what he failed to understand about his wife and his marriage. Not long afterward, he dies.

Paganino, knowing Bartolomea’s affection for him, makes her his lawful wife. The couple live happily together without observing the saints’ days, vigils, and Lenten restrictions that had governed her life with Ricciardo. The conclusion converts the terms of Ricciardo’s control into the measure of his failure: the rules that were supposed to keep Bartolomea from other men only make the difference between the two households more vivid. The episode is comic in its use of calendars, bodily desire, and Ricciardo’s repeated defeat, but its reversal depends on Bartolomea’s clear account of what she wants and her refusal to let a husband’s status or a family’s reputation speak in her place.