Crete where the sisters settled is the place where three young couples turn an escape into an apparently secure new life, only for jealousy and violence to dismantle it. In Lauretta’s story, the island first promises distance from family authority and the pleasures of a new household; it becomes instead the setting for a poisoning, an arrest, and the collapse of the lovers’ prosperity.

Arrival and Settlement

The lovers secretly prepare to leave for Crete. The young men sell lands under the pretense of going trading, convert their other goods into money, and buy and equip a light brigantine. Ninetta persuades her sisters to join the venture. On the appointed night, the three women take a great quantity of money and jewels from their father’s coffer, meet the men aboard the vessel, and put to sea.

The couples stop first at Genoa, where they take their first ease together, then continue from port to port. They reach Crete before the eighth day without hindrance. Their arrival completes a rapid passage from secret departure to a new life beyond their family’s immediate reach.

A Life near Candia

On the island, the six buy extensive and handsome estates near Candia and build fine, agreeable dwelling houses. Their settlement is presented through its abundance: they live like lords, with many servants, hounds, hawks, and horses, passing their days in feasting and merrymaking. Crete gives them not merely shelter but the material conditions of the prosperous life they had sought when they left home.

That prosperity, however, does not secure the relationships on which the household depends. Once Restagnone can enjoy Ninetta without obstacle or restraint, his desire for her wanes. At an entertainment he sees a beautiful, noble young woman of the country and begins courting her, lavishing entertainments and attentions on her. The island’s freedom from the lovers’ former constraints thus brings a new instability: access and plenty give way to boredom, rivalry, and suspicion.

Jealousy and Violence

Ninetta learns of Restagnone’s courtship and becomes consumed by jealousy. Her reproaches do not restore his affection; instead, the story says, they intensify his pursuit of the other woman. Ninetta comes to believe that Restagnone has won his new beloved’s favor, and her love for him turns to hatred. She decides to avenge the affront by killing him.

She obtains a deadly drink from an old Greek woman skilled in compounding poisons and gives it to Restagnone one evening while he is heated and unsuspecting. He dies before morning. Folco, Ughetto, and their mistresses mourn him and arrange an honorable burial, not knowing that poison caused his death. Crete’s apparent refuge has become the scene of a concealed crime among the very group that arrived together.

Arrest and the Broken Refuge

The secret emerges through an indirect chain of events. The old woman is arrested for another offense and, under torture, confesses to making the poison for Ninetta. The Duke of Crete then surrounds Folco’s palace by surprise at night and takes Ninetta prisoner. Without torturing her, he obtains her account of Restagnone’s death. The island’s political authority reaches into the private estate and ends the concealment that had protected the killers’ new life.

The story’s account of the wider outcome turns the settlement into the starting point of a wider ruin. Maddalena gives herself to the duke to save her sister from death, but her own lover kills her and flees with Ninetta. Bertella and her lover Ughetto are accused of the new murder; both confess, then bribe their keepers and escape to Rhodes, where they die in poverty. The move to Crete had brought the couples wealth and apparent security, but it could not keep jealousy, violence, and punishment from remaking their fortunes.