Fiammetta

Fiammetta is the second of the seven women who gather in Santa Maria Novella and leave Florence during the plague, and one of the Decameron company’s most active storytellers. Her significance lies in the range of situations she brings before the company: she tells of women defending themselves against desire and unjust suspicion, of lovers meeting tragic ends, of comic deceptions, and of generosity that turns away from possession. On the fifth day she becomes queen and sets a theme of happiness after adversity, making her both a teller of individual stories and a guide to the company’s changing emotional register.

Identity and Place in the Company

The narrator names Fiammetta second among the seven women, after Pampinea and before Filomena. The women’s names are chosen for the purposes of the account rather than offered as their verifiable identities: the narrator says they are selected to keep the speakers distinguishable while guarding the women’s reputations from later scandal. Fiammetta therefore enters the book as a carefully framed voice within a company whose members exchange authority through storytelling.

The gathering is not simply an audience for her tales. Its members take turns speaking, listening, eating, singing, dancing, and diverting themselves in the garden. Fiammetta appears within that shared routine in different capacities: as a narrator summoned by the reigning queen, as a participant in the company’s leisure, and, on the fifth day, as queen herself. Her role changes with the company’s daily succession rather than developing through a single continuous personal plot.

A Storyteller of Desire and Social Constraint

Fiammetta’s first recorded tale in the supplied episodes concerns the Marchioness of Monferrato, who checks the King of France’s desire through a meal of hens and a pointed response. Introducing the story, Fiammetta connects its subject to the power of prompt and apt speech. She also draws a distinction between a man’s discretion in loving a woman of higher rank and a woman’s discretion in guarding herself against love from a man of greater condition. In this framing, the Marchioness’s verbal skill is not ornamental: it lets her resist an unwanted advance and divert the man who makes it.

On the fourth day, under Filostrato’s rule, Fiammetta begins the day’s storytelling with the deaths of Ghismonda and Guiscardo. She calls attention to the painful contrast between the company’s purpose of making merry and the day’s appointed subject of sorrowful love. Ghismonda, the daughter of Tancred, has returned to her father after becoming a widow; because he does not arrange another marriage for her, she secretly chooses Guiscardo, a young servant whose worth and manners she esteems above those of other men at court. Fiammetta’s introduction emphasizes both the father’s tender attachment and the daughter’s constrained position. The story’s terrible outcome gives her an unmistakably tragic example of love, sharply unlike the comic and fortunate turns she narrates elsewhere.

Her range is especially clear in the stories she tells on later days. On the sixth day, she takes a comic claim about the supposed nobility of Florence’s Cadgers as the occasion for Michele Scalza’s boastful argument and wager. On the seventh, she tells of a merchant whose groundless jealousy confines his beautiful wife so severely that she cannot attend weddings, entertainments, or church, or even stand at a window. Fiammetta presents the woman’s eventual pursuit of consolation as a response to unjust suspicion and confinement, not as an isolated prank detached from its cause. Across these tales, desire is shaped by social power: a woman may have to answer an advance, endure restrictions, or devise a way to reclaim some freedom.

Comic Reversals and the Uses of Deception

On the eighth day, Fiammetta answers the company’s distress at the scholar’s harsh revenge in Pampinea’s preceding story with a more moderate comic case. She tells of the Sienese neighbours Zeppa di Mino and Spinelloccio Tanena, who appear to love one another like brothers. Spinelloccio, however, has secretly become the lover of Zeppa’s wife. Zeppa discovers them embracing and entering a chamber together, but keeps hidden rather than making a public outcry. Fiammetta introduces the episode as an example of revenge that should repay an injury without exceeding what the injury warrants. The contrast between concealed discovery and calculated retaliation makes moderation, rather than innocence, the measure of Zeppa’s response.

On the ninth day, she returns to Calandrino, whose sayings and doings the company has heard about before. Fiammetta openly acknowledges the recurrence and argues that a familiar subject can still please when it suits the occasion. She says she will tell the story in its true form rather than disguise it under other names, because departing from what happened would diminish the listener’s pleasure. The episode concerns Calandrino’s attraction to Niccolosa and Bruno’s talisman, which supposedly enables Calandrino to win her; his wife discovers him with the woman, bringing him trouble and distress. Fiammetta’s comments make the repeated character part of the storytelling itself: familiar material is not a failure of invention when a new incident and its telling fit the company’s present mood.

Queenship and the Fifth-Day Theme

At the close of the fourth day, Filostrato yields the crown to Fiammetta, asking her to console the company after the day’s stories of lovers’ misfortune. She accepts the office and chooses the fifth-day theme: what has happily befallen lovers after cruel and unfortunate adventures. The change is more than a shift in subject. After Fiammetta has introduced a story of fatal love, she is entrusted to lead a day organized around survival, reversal, and eventual happiness.

As queen, Fiammetta oversees the company’s return to its routine. She summons the women and young men at dawn, leads them into the fields for a leisurely walk, and later gathers them for the day’s storytelling by the fountain. After the meal and dancing, she appoints Pamfilo to begin the stories. Her authority is practical as well as thematic: she arranges the transition from morning recreation to the established afternoon session, and her chosen subject gives the day’s tales a shared emotional direction.

Narrative Range and Significance

Fiammetta’s final supplied appearance as a storyteller comes on the tenth day, when discussion of generosity has left the company divided over the conduct of Gilberto, Messer Ansaldo, and the magician in the affairs of Madam Dianora. Filostrato asks her to end the dispute with a story. Rather than press the preceding question into a narrow argument, she remarks that conversation in their company should be broad enough not to become a contest of fine distinctions. She then tells of King Charles the Old, who falls in love with a young girl but, ashamed of his desire, honours both her and her sister by arranging their marriages. Her choice redirects debate through a tale of restraint and generous action.

The range of Fiammetta’s appearances is the point: she can introduce a tragic love story with solemnity, direct a day toward fortunate conclusions, defend a woman’s resistance to an unwanted pursuit, and use comic reversals to explore jealousy and revenge. She also attends to the circumstances that give such stories their force—rank, marriage, confinement, reputation, and the difference between desire and self-command. In the company’s design, her tales do not settle on a single verdict about love. They let the same subject appear as danger, suffering, amusement, or an occasion for honourable restraint, while her fifth-day queenship turns that variety into a deliberate movement from misfortune toward consolation.