Nastagio’s unrequited love and dissipation of his fortune

Nastagio degli Onesti’s unrequited love turns inherited wealth into an instrument of self-destruction: the more his beloved rejects him, the more fiercely he loves and spends. Pressed by his kinsfolk to leave Ravenna, he settles at nearby Chiassi, where an encounter in the pine wood redirects his story. The tale’s movement from private obsession and dwindling fortune to a spectacle that alters his beloved’s response makes his retreat the hinge between romantic suffering and resolution.

Identity and Background

Nastagio is a young, unmarried gentleman of Ravenna. The deaths of his father and an uncle leave him extraordinarily rich, and he falls in love with a daughter of Messer Paolo Traversari, whose family is of much higher standing than his own. He hopes that his conduct will win her affection, but the difference in their family rank accompanies a relationship already unequal in feeling: he is devoted to her, while she remains cruel and unmoved.

The narrator describes Nastagio’s efforts as good and commendable, but they bring him no closer to his goal. His beloved’s beauty and noble birth are presented as possible reasons for her pride, not as proof of her private motives. What the story makes plain is the painful imbalance between his repeated acts of devotion and her lack of reciprocation.

Love and the Dissipation of Fortune

Rejection does not loosen Nastagio’s attachment. When he grows weary of complaining, he considers abandoning the woman altogether or, if he can, hating her as she hates him. Neither resolve lasts. The less hope he has, the more his love seems to intensify, and he continues both to love and to spend without restraint.

The danger is consequently more than emotional. His friends and kinsfolk fear that he will consume both himself and his substance. They repeatedly counsel him to leave Ravenna for a time, reasoning that distance may lessen his passion and his expenditure. Nastagio resists for a long while, then yields when their urging becomes impossible to refuse. The episode links his romantic fixation to a concrete loss: wealth that could have secured his independence instead sustains a pursuit that earns him no affection.

Retreat to Chiassi

Nastagio makes preparations as though he were going to France, Spain, or some other distant country. Instead, he rides out of Ravenna with many friends and takes up residence at Chiassi, about three miles from the city. He sends for tents and pavilions, tells his companions that he intends to stay, and sends them back to Ravenna. The retreat removes him from the immediate setting of his disappointment without yet ending his attachment.

At Chiassi he continues to live magnificently, inviting different guests to dinners and suppers as he had been accustomed to do. Near the beginning of May, on a fine day, thoughts of his cruel mistress again absorb him. He asks his servants to leave him alone so that he can think, then wanders into the pine wood. Nearly half a mile into it, close to the fifth hour of the day, he has forgotten both food and everything else around him. His withdrawal from company has not freed him from the beloved; it has carried his solitary meditation into the setting of the tale’s decisive encounter.

The Spectacle and Its Consequence

Nastagio’s thoughts are interrupted by a woman’s cries. He sees a beautiful young woman running naked through dense undergrowth, weeping and begging for mercy, her body torn by bushes and brambles. Two huge mastiffs pursue her and bite her when they catch up. Behind them rides a wrathful knight on a black horse, armed with a sword and threatening her with death. The sudden violence breaks into the story of Nastagio’s private longing: the pine wood makes visible a punishment that he will later use to change the situation that his own spending and persistence could not resolve.

The story’s heading records the consequence of what he witnesses. Nastagio invites his kinsfolk and the woman he loves to dinner; she sees the same spectacle, fears that a like fate may await her, and takes him as her husband. The outcome reverses the earlier pattern: the man whose costly efforts could not win affection becomes the person whose arranged encounter changes his beloved’s decision. Filomena introduces the story as an example of cruelty avenged by divine justice, framing Nastagio’s romantic predicament within a moral pattern in which rejection and punishment are brought into unsettling proximity.