Nastagio’s Spectral Hunt at Chiassi

Nastagio’s Spectral Hunt at Chiassi is a recurring supernatural punishment that Nastagio degli Onesti witnesses and then deliberately stages before the woman who has rejected him. The dead knight’s pursuit of a woman condemned for her cruelty becomes both a terrifying spectacle and the instrument of Nastagio’s courtship: after seeing the woman hunted and killed, his beloved agrees to marry him. The episode ends not only in their union but with a broader change in the conduct of Ravenna’s women, whom the story says become more amenable to men’s desires.

Setting and First Appearance

Nastagio has withdrawn from Ravenna after friends and relatives, alarmed by his spending and despair over his unreturned love, urge him to leave. He settles at Chiassi, about three miles from the city, where he continues to entertain guests lavishly. Near the beginning of May, on a fine day, he wanders alone into the pine forest, absorbed in thoughts of the woman he loves. The fifth hour has nearly passed; he has walked well into the wood and has forgotten both food and everything else around him.

A woman’s cries abruptly break his meditation. Nastagio sees a beautiful, naked woman fleeing through the undergrowth, her body torn by bushes and brambles. Two huge Mastiffs pursue and bite her whenever they catch her; behind them rides a knight on a black horse, dressed in dark armour and carrying a sword. The scene first fills Nastagio with terror and astonishment, then with pity. Though unarmed, he takes a tree branch as a club and advances to defend the woman. The knight calls him by name and orders him not to interfere, turning the apparent rescue into a confrontation over who has the right to act.

The Knight’s Account and the Repeated Punishment

The knight identifies himself as Messer Guido degli Anastagi, a fellow citizen whom Nastagio remembers from childhood. He explains that he had loved the woman more passionately than Nastagio loves his own beloved. In despair at her hardness of heart, he killed himself with the very sword he now carries. The woman, he says, died not long afterward. Because she had been glad of his death and had felt no remorse for her cruelty, both were condemned to punishment after death.

The sentence turns their former relationship inside out. Messer Guido once loved her; now he pursues her as an enemy. She must flee, and whenever he catches her, he must kill her with the sword by which he killed himself, tear out her heart and entrails, and give them to the dogs. By divine justice, she rises again as if nothing had happened, and the chase begins anew. Every Friday, at this hour, he catches her in this forest; on other days he overtakes her elsewhere, in places where she had acted cruelly toward him. Their punishment lasts for as many years as her cruelty lasted for months.

After Messer Guido finishes speaking, he runs at the woman. The Mastiffs hold her fast, and he strikes her through the breast. He then opens her body with his hunting knife, pulls out her heart and the surrounding entrails, and casts them to the dogs, which devour them. Before long, the woman rises and flees toward the sea, still pursued by the dogs. Nastagio watches the impossible scene with both pity and fear. Its regular Friday recurrence, however, gives him an idea: the spectacle can be made to serve his own purpose.

The Banquet as a Deliberate Spectacle

Nastagio asks his friends and relatives to arrange a Friday dinner at Chiassi for Messer Paolo Traversari, his wife and daughter, and the other women whose presence he wants. He does not tell them why. Instead, he promises that they will see the reason when they arrive. While the invitation is arranged, he prepares a magnificent banquet and places the tables among the pines, around the very spot where he saw the woman killed.

He seats his beloved directly opposite the place where the hunt is due to appear. The final dish has scarcely arrived when the hunted woman’s desperate cries are heard. The guests rise in alarm, and the woman, knight, and dogs soon come into view among them. Many rush forward to help, as Nastagio had done on his first encounter, but Messer Guido’s explanation terrifies them into drawing back. He repeats the same pursuit and killing before the assembled company.

The audience is not detached from the scene. Several women present are kin to both the dead woman and the knight, and remember the history of their love and his death; they weep as though the violence were happening to them. Nastagio’s beloved, having seen and heard the whole episode, understands herself to be especially implicated. She recalls the cruelty she has shown him and imagines herself already fleeing before an enraged lover with the Mastiffs at her heels. The supernatural spectacle thus changes its immediate target: it does not physically touch her, but makes the punishment seem personally imminent.

Marriage and the Story’s Social Consequence

That same evening, Nastagio’s beloved sends a trusted chamberwoman to ask him to visit her, saying she is ready to do what he wishes. He welcomes the change but asks that the relationship proceed honourably, by taking her as his wife. She agrees, and then tells her parents herself that she consents to marry him. Nastagio marries her the following Sunday, and the two live together happily for a long time.

The tale extends the consequence beyond this couple: the women of Ravenna are said thereafter to be much more amenable to men’s desires. That ending makes the hunt more than a marvel witnessed in a forest or a private turning point in a romance. Nastagio converts a recurring punishment into a calculated public display, and fear accomplishes what his prior pursuit and expenditure could not. The episode’s structure links repetition to persuasion: the woman’s repeated flight and death make the possibility of suffering vivid to the audience, while the banquet repeats the event in a setting Nastagio has chosen and arranged. Its happy marriage ending is therefore joined to a troubling civic moral, in which one woman’s terror is presented as a warning that disciplines other women as well.