Guidotto da Cremona

Guidotto da Cremona is a veteran Lombard soldier whose brief appearance in the story of Agnesa turns an act of rescue during the sack of Faenza into the key to her later recognition. At the end of his life he entrusts the girl, whom he has raised as his own, and everything he possesses to Giacomino da Pavia, asking him to provide for her future. The history Guidotto leaves behind links a child displaced by war to the family from which she was separated.

Identity and Background

Guidotto is introduced as one of two elderly Lombards living in Fano; the other is Giacomino, his longtime friend and comrade. Both men had spent much of their youth as soldiers and in arms. Guidotto has no son, other close kin, or trusted friend more than Giacomino, a circumstance that makes his final bequest both an act of confidence and the means by which the girl's care continues after his death.

The Child Found at Faenza

Guidotto's account of the girl's beginnings reaches the other characters through what he told Giacomino on his deathbed. During the capture and pillage of Faenza, Guidotto and his companions entered a house filled with booty but abandoned by its inhabitants. The only person left inside was a little girl, about two years old. When she saw Guidotto coming up the stairs, she called him father. He took pity on her and carried her away to Fano, along with the goods from the house.

That first encounter contains the story's central contrast: the child is found amid the spoils of a violent seizure, yet Guidotto's response to her appeal is to take her into his care. He does not know whose daughter she is. The account preserves the circumstances of her separation and rescue, but cannot by itself restore her name or family.

Bequest and Care

As he is dying, Guidotto leaves the girl and all his worldly possessions to Giacomino, whom he trusts above anyone else. He asks his friend to bring her up and, when the time is right, arrange her marriage and give her the dowry that had belonged to her. The instruction makes her future part of his final arrangements: she is not merely left in another person's household but entrusted to a guardian charged with protecting her interests.

Giacomino carries out that responsibility after returning to Faenza, where he treats the girl as his own child. Guidotto's confidence in his companion thus gives the child a continuing home and preserves the account of where she was found. Guidotto's action is not presented as a formal adoption; the story instead emphasizes his care for the child and the deliberate transfer of responsibility to a trusted friend.

Recognition and Narrative Significance

When the girl later becomes the subject of a dispute over marriage, Giacomino explains how she came into his care. A man who had been present with Guidotto during the pillage recognizes the house as belonging to Bernabuccio, who recalls losing a daughter of the same age in those troubles. Guidotto's deathbed testimony therefore proves crucial beyond the immediate purpose for which he gave it: details he preserved about the child's discovery make her birth family identifiable years later.

Guidotto is absent from this later recognition, but his decisions shape its possibility. He rescues the girl from the abandoned house, tells Giacomino the circumstances, and leaves her in the care of a friend who can eventually recount them. In the story narrated by Neifile, his legacy is both material and personal: he passes on property, but also the truth that allows a lost child to be recognized as Bernabuccio's daughter.