Pietro di Vinciolo

Pietro di Vinciolo is a rich man of Perugia whose marriage becomes the setting for a comic reversal of sexual betrayal and domestic authority. He takes a wife partly, the narrator suggests, to distract others and lessen the suspicion in which the Perugians hold him; his wife, meanwhile, wants a husband who will share her desire for men. When Pietro comes home early and discovers her lover under a hen-coop, he exposes a hypocrisy that he cannot cleanly condemn: he has neglected his wife while pursuing men himself. The story ends with the three at supper and with Pietro apparently making some accommodation, though the narrator leaves the terms unstated.

Identity and Marriage

Pietro is introduced as a wealthy resident of Perugia. The narrator speculates that he married less from personal desire than to beguile others and reduce the general suspicion attached to him among his fellow citizens. The story presents that explanation as a possibility, not as a fact Pietro himself confirms; what is clear is the disparity between the spouses’ appetites.

His wife is described as full-bodied, red-haired, and sexually vigorous, with a desire for more than one husband. Pietro, by contrast, has his mind set on other pursuits. As she becomes aware of the mismatch, she grows angry, and their differences repeatedly surface in quarrels. The marriage thus brings them together in name while leaving the wife’s expectations of intimacy unmet.

Neglect and the Wife’s Response

The wife first tries to address her dissatisfaction in arguments with Pietro. When she concludes that these disputes are exhausting her without changing his conduct, she resolves to seek sexual pleasure elsewhere. Her reasoning turns the accusation of adultery back on her husband: she entered marriage expecting him to desire women, while he knew she was a woman when he married her. In her view, his neglect has left her waiting until her youth passes, and his own conduct supplies an example of how a person might seek pleasure outside the marriage.

She does not present herself as free of risk. She continues to fear discovery, and she arranges for an older woman to bring suitable young men to her privately, choosing among them as opportunities arise. One evening, expecting Pietro to dine away from home with his friend Ercolano, she has a young man brought to the house. They have barely sat down to supper when Pietro calls at the door, returning unexpectedly.

The Hen-Coop and the Discovery

Caught unprepared, Pietro’s wife cannot send her guest away or find another hiding place. She puts him beneath a hen-coop in a shed adjoining the room and covers it with the sacking of a pallet-bed she had emptied that day. She then opens the door to Pietro. Her quick concealment postpones discovery, but it also traps the young man in a cramped hiding place from which he cannot move freely.

Pietro explains that his own supper ended before the meal began. At Ercolano’s house, he says, repeated sneezing had led the company to investigate a cupboard near the stairs; opening it released a foul smell of sulphur, which Ercolano’s wife explained as the residue of bleaching veils. Pietro recounts the episode to his wife, who seizes on it to denounce Ercolano’s wife as an adulteress and to demand severe punishment for women who betray their husbands. Her performance of moral outrage is especially pointed because her own lover is hidden only a short distance away.

A thirsty ass escapes its halter in the stable and wanders into the shed. The young man has put one hand beyond the coop to support himself; the ass steps on his fingers and keeps its hoof there. His cries alert Pietro, who follows the noise, lifts the coop, and finds him. The discovery is accidental, caused not by investigation but by the animal’s wandering and the lover’s pain.

Confrontation and Reversal

Pietro recognizes the young man as someone he had long pursued for his own sexual purposes. Rather than attack him, he takes him by the hand, brings him into the chamber, and asks how he came to be concealed there. The young man tells him what happened. Pietro’s pleasure at finding him contrasts with his wife’s terror at being exposed, and the two responses immediately unsettle the expected roles of betrayed husband and guilty wife.

Pietro confronts his wife with the contradiction between her condemnation of Ercolano’s wife and her own affair. She answers that he cannot fairly compare her with a woman who receives affection from her husband. Pietro clothes and supports her, she acknowledges, but has not lain with her for a long time; she would rather have less material provision and be treated as a wife in bed. She insists that she has the same desires as other women and argues that his own conduct makes his accusation unjust: he condemns her for seeking elsewhere what he has not given her, while continuing to pursue his own pleasures.

An Unresolved Accommodation

Pietro does not answer her point with a punishment or a sustained defense. He says that there is no need to continue the argument for the moment and asks her to prepare supper, since neither he nor the young man has eaten. She resets the table and serves the meal she had already prepared. The three eat together, and the wife is described as cheerful in their company.

The narrator admits that Pietro’s precise arrangement for satisfying all three has escaped his memory. The young man is escorted back to the public place the following morning, but the narrator cannot say whether he had been more a wife or a husband during the night. That uncertainty is the story’s final reversal: Pietro has exposed his wife’s infidelity, yet his own desire for the lover prevents the discovery from resolving into ordinary marital discipline. Dioneo closes by recommending reciprocal treatment—answering a spouse’s conduct in kind—so the episode’s comedy rests on the collapse of a simple distinction between injured husband and unfaithful wife.