Fiesole Bishop

In the tale told by Emilia, the rector of Fiesole is a priest whose persistent advances toward Madam Piccarda bring him not the affair he seeks but an arranged exposure before the bishop. His defeat depends on his own presumption: after Piccarda pretends to yield, he enters her dark bedroom and mistakes her serving-woman for her. The story makes a would-be spiritual authority the target of a practical lesson in restraint, and leaves him to face both formal penance and lasting public ridicule.

Position and Character

The rector serves the cathedral at Fiesole, an ancient city that has declined but remains a bishop’s seat. He becomes enamored of Madam Piccarda, a young and attractive widow of noble birth who lives near the cathedral on an estate with her two brothers. The story presents his desire alongside a sharp contrast in age and conduct: he is old in years but young in judgment, arrogant, presumptuous, and so disagreeable in manner that few people like him. His ecclesiastical position does not moderate his behavior. Instead, he treats his standing as no reason to restrain his pursuit of a woman who has plainly refused him.

Piccarda tells him that, as a priest and her spiritual father, he ought to be modest and chaste. She also invokes her own circumstances as a widow, whose conduct is expected to show discretion, and makes clear that she will never love him in the way he demands. Her refusal is not ambiguous, but the rector neither accepts nor respects it. He returns to the request repeatedly, using letters, messages, and approaches when he sees her at church. His persistence turns his private desire into an ongoing intrusion on her life and prompts her to seek her brothers’ counsel before acting.

The Deception in the Bedroom

With her brothers’ consent, Piccarda changes tactics. When the rector approaches her again, she pretends that his persistence has overcome her resistance and agrees to meet him. She says that her small house and her brothers’ nearby bedroom make secrecy difficult, but proposes that he come at night and remain silent in the dark. He accepts the arrangement and presses for the meeting that same evening. Piccarda’s apparent consent is part of a plan, not a change of heart.

The person who receives him is Ciutazza, Piccarda’s serving-woman, who is described as conspicuously ill-favored and eager for the new shift her mistress promises. Piccarda instructs her to lie in the bed and give the visitor caresses without speaking, so the brothers will not hear. The rector enters in darkness, goes to the bed as directed, and embraces Ciutazza, believing her to be Piccarda. He says nothing, and she follows the instructions she has been given. The substitution succeeds because the rector trusts his expectation more than his senses: he has never seen the woman in the room clearly enough to discover the deception before he acts.

Exposure and Punishment

Piccarda’s brothers carry the plot beyond the bedroom. They leave quietly and go to the square, where they encounter the bishop, who has come seeking their company and returns with them to their house. After drinking wine in their courtyard, they invite him to see something inside. One brother leads the way with a lit torch; the bishop and the others follow to the chamber where the rector, exhausted after his encounter, has fallen asleep beside Ciutazza.

Awakened by the light and the assembled company, the rector hides beneath the bedclothes. The bishop rebukes him and makes him look at the woman with whom he has lain. Only then does the rector understand Piccarda’s trick. At the bishop’s command he dresses and is sent home under guard to undergo penance for his offense. The bishop hears the brothers’ account and commends Piccarda and her family: they have dealt with the priest without resorting to violence. The rector’s punishment is therefore both disciplinary and public in its immediate circumstances, although the story does not specify any further formal sanction.

Ridicule and Narrative Significance

The rector is ordered to bewail his offense for forty days, but the story distinguishes that prescribed penance from his longer-lived shame. For a great while, children point him out in the street as the man who slept with Ciutazza; the mockery troubles him so severely that he is said to be nearly driven mad. His attempted secrecy produces the opposite result: the episode becomes the label by which the community remembers him. Ciutazza, meanwhile, receives the promised shift and has the merry night she agreed to.

Emilia introduces the episode among stories of clerics who impose themselves on women, and presents Piccarda’s response as a fitting answer to the rector’s importunity. The reversal is exact: the priest who expects to command a private encounter becomes an unwitting participant in a household plan, then an object of the bishop’s reprimand and the children’s derision. Piccarda and her brothers use coordination, darkness, and the bishop’s arrival rather than physical force, while the rector’s own appetite makes the deception possible. His story thus joins comic exposure to criticism of a cleric whose religious office and professed role as spiritual father fail to restrain his conduct.