Michele Scalza

Michele Scalza is a merry young Florentine whose comic defense of the Cadgers turns an argument about family rank into a performance of improvised logic. At a gathering near Florence, he wagers a supper that professional beggars are the oldest and noblest gentlemen in the world. His proof rests on their distinctive faces: God, he reasons, must have made them while still learning to draw. The joke wins him the meal, but its force comes from more than a clever conclusion: Scalza makes his listeners’ own assumptions about antiquity, nobility, and appearance serve the absurd case he has built.

Identity and Introduction

Scalza appears in a brief episode told by Fiammetta on the sixth day. She introduces the story after recalling Pamfilo’s mention of the Cadgers of Florence and presents Scalza’s tale as another treatment of the day’s theme. In the story, he is described as an unusually merry and agreeable young man, known for always having remarkable stories ready. His companions particularly enjoy his company when they set out together for pleasure. His social role is therefore established through conversation and entertainment: he is a familiar presence among young Florentines, and his stories make him welcome in their company.

The episode places him at Monte Ughi with a group of companions. Their conversation turns to which Florentine families are the oldest and best-born. Some nominate the Uberti, others the Lamberti, and still others name different houses. Scalza hears their competing claims, laughs, and abruptly overturns the discussion. The Cadgers, he declares, are superior not only to the families under debate but to all gentlemen in the world—or even the Maremma. He specifies that he means the Cadgers who live near Santa Maria Maggiore, making the joke point to a recognizable group rather than an abstract invention.

The Wager and Its Audience

The companions initially assume Scalza is merely trying to gull them. They know the Cadgers and cannot see how professional beggars could outrank Florence’s established families. Scalza insists that he is speaking in earnest and proposes a wager: the winner will receive a supper, with six companions of his choosing included. He also offers to accept the judgment of anyone the group selects, so that the dispute will not be settled by his own say-so.

Neri Mannini takes the opposing side. The group agrees that Piero di Fiorentino, in whose house they are, will act as judge, and they all go to him expecting Scalza to lose. Their anticipation matters to the scene: the wager converts a familiar contest over social standing into a public test of Scalza’s reasoning. Piero first hears Neri’s case, then asks Scalza to prove his assertion. The young man must do more than deliver a punchline; he must make the company follow a chain of reasoning that appears to meet the terms of their own argument.

The Argument About Nobility

Scalza begins with a premise the young men had already accepted: the more ancient a group is, the nobler it is. He then makes the Cadgers’ antiquity the deciding question. According to his deliberately comic account, God created them at the beginning, when He was first learning to draw; the rest of humankind came later, after He had learned the art. If age confers nobility, the Cadgers must therefore outrank everyone else.

He supports this invented chronology by directing his listeners to compare faces. Other people, he says, have features arranged in due proportion, while the Cadgers display the irregularities of a novice’s first attempts: one face is excessively long and narrow, another too broad; noses may be too long or too short; chins project and turn upward; jaws are so large that they resemble a donkey’s; and eyes can be unequal in size or set at different heights. The physical description supplies the apparent evidence for his claim, transforming a visible difference into a mock proof of great age. Its comic logic depends on taking the companions’ premise seriously while making its conclusion increasingly ridiculous.

Victory and Narrative Function

Piero, Neri, and the others laugh at the reasoning and concede that Scalza has won. Their laughter is not separate from the proof: once they remember the Cadgers’ faces, the group accepts the very comparison that made the argument absurd. Scalza receives the supper wager, to be shared with the companions he chooses. The episode closes by connecting his joke to Pamfilo’s earlier use of a Cadger as a measure of ugliness: Forese da Rabatta’s face, Pamfilo had remarked, would have looked notably ugly even on one of them.

Scalza’s brief appearance gives him a compact but distinct comic role. He is not shown pursuing a lasting ambition or changing over the course of the tale; instead, his character is made legible through one social contest, in which cheerfulness, confidence, and verbal ingenuity turn the group’s skepticism into an audience for his wit. The story also makes rank itself the target of the joke. Scalza does not establish the Cadgers’ nobility through lineage, property, or public office, but by twisting the claim that antiquity determines precedence until bodily caricature becomes his evidence. His victory is both material—a supper won—and rhetorical: the company accepts, for the pleasure of the jest, a hierarchy that reverses the one with which the debate began.