Bertola’s solitary life on a deserted island

Bertola’s solitary life on a deserted island is a temporary refuge forced upon Beritola Caracciola by the collapse of her family and political world. After pirates carry away her children, she remains alone on Ponza, living on herbs and water and nursing two newborn goats. The image of a bereaved mother becoming the foster-mother of animals gives physical form to her isolation; her eventual discovery by Currado Malespina and his wife opens a path back to human company and renewed hope.

Identity and Circumstances

Beritola Caracciola is a noblewoman of Naples and the wife of Arrighetto Capece, a gentleman who holds the governance of Sicily under Manfred. When Charles I of Anjou defeats Manfred at Benevento and takes possession of the island, Arrighetto prepares to flee rather than submit to his lord’s enemy. His plan is discovered, however, and he is imprisoned along with other supporters of Manfred. The political upheaval thus separates Beritola from her husband before her own exile begins.

Pregnant and frightened for what has happened to Arrighetto, Beritola abandons her possessions and escapes by boat with her elder son, Giusfredi, who is about eight years old. At Lipari she gives birth to a second son, Scacciato. With a nurse and both children, she boards a ship intending to return to her relatives in Naples. Instead, contrary winds drive the ship to Ponza, where the passengers wait for a chance to continue their journey. Her stay on the island begins not as a chosen retreat but as an interruption in a flight from danger.

Separation and Life in Isolation

Beritola makes a habit of going to a secluded place on the island to mourn her absent husband and fear for the future. During one of these daily absences, a pirate galley arrives unseen and takes the nurse and both children, along with the other people and goods from the little ship. When Beritola returns to the shore, she finds them gone. She sees the galley towing the vessel out to sea and understands that she has lost her children as well as her husband.

Her response is first physical collapse: she falls unconscious on the strand, calling for her family. When she comes to, she weeps, searches the caves, and calls for the children, but finds no trace of them. Nightfall forces her to abandon the search. Afraid and in great grief, she returns to the cavern where she has been accustomed to lament. The narrative marks her isolation through repeated, practical acts of survival as well as mourning: after a night without food, and once the hour of tierce has passed the next day, hunger drives her to eat herbs.

The children’s fate develops elsewhere, beyond Beritola’s knowledge. The corsairs take them and their nurse to Genoa, where all three become part of the spoils allotted to Messer Guasparrino d’Oria and are sent to serve as slaves in his household. The nurse fears that their identities could expose them to danger, so she presents the boys as her own sons and gives the elder a different name, Giannotto di Procida. This parallel strand sharpens the separation: Beritola is not only unable to find her family, but is cut off from the circumstances that might explain their disappearance.

The Kids as Companions

While thinking about how she will live, Beritola notices a she-goat enter a nearby cavern and leave for the woods. She goes inside and discovers two newborn kids. Still producing milk after giving birth to Scacciato, she lifts them and offers them her breast. They suckle, accept her as their mother, and thereafter make no distinction between her and the goat that bore them.

The scene changes the pattern of the island’s solitude without undoing its cause. Beritola has no news of her husband or sons, and her human household has vanished; the kids offer neither explanation nor reunion. They do, however, give her a form of company and a task of care. She grows familiar with the old goat as well as its young, and, feeling that she has found companions in the desolate place, resolves to live and die there. Her life remains austere: she eats herbs, drinks water, and weeps whenever she remembers her family and her former existence. The nurturing bond is at once a means of endurance and a measure of how completely her life has been stripped down.

Discovery and Departure

After some months, a vessel from Pisa arrives at the same place, having also been driven there by bad weather. Aboard is Currado Malespina, returning with his wife from a pilgrimage to the holy places in the kingdom of Apulia. One day, while they explore the island with servants and dogs, the now-grown kids are chased into Beritola’s cavern. She springs up with a staff and drives the dogs away.

Currado and his wife follow and are astonished by the woman they find: she is lean, darkened, and hairy after her months in isolation. Beritola is equally startled by the strangers. At her request, Currado calls off the dogs; after much entreaty, she tells them who she is and recounts what has happened, including her firm resolve to remain alone. Currado recognizes the name of Arrighetto Capece and is moved to tears. He urges Beritola to abandon what he regards as a barbarous purpose, offering either to take her back to her own home or to receive her into his household and honor her as a sister until fortune improves.

Beritola initially refuses these offers. Currado leaves his wife with her, instructing her to bring food and clothing for the woman, whose garments are rags, and to find a way to persuade her to come away. His wife comforts Beritola, provides clothes and provisions, and finally persuades her to dress and eat. The island episode therefore ends through the combined force of recognition, practical care, and patient persuasion—not through the sudden restoration of the family she has lost.

Narrative Significance

Emilia introduces the surrounding tale as an account of Fortune’s painful reversals: hearing such stories, she says, can make the fortunate wary and console the unhappy, even when later joy scarcely seems to cancel earlier bitterness. Beritola’s months on Ponza give that claim its starkest image. A noblewoman’s status cannot protect her from political defeat, capture, shipwreck, or the disappearance of her children; on the island, survival depends on hunger-driven foraging and the milk her body can give to animals.

The episode also turns separation into a contrast between what the reader knows and what Beritola can know. The account follows the nurse and children into enslavement in Genoa while Beritola remains ignorant on Ponza, and shows the nurse preserving the boys through concealment and a changed name. Against that hidden continuation, Beritola’s settled expectation of dying alone is not the final truth of the wider story. The tale’s synopsis promises that her sons will eventually be recognized and restored to high estate. Her solitary life is thus both a self-contained ordeal and one stage in a longer movement from family rupture toward recovery.