Pistoia serves as the setting for two sharply different episodes of social negotiation in the Decameron. In one, a valuable palfrey becomes the price of a carefully limited conversation; in the other, a widow devises a dangerous test to rid herself of two suitors. The city is not described through landmarks or a broad portrait of civic life. Instead, it takes shape through the people who meet there, the households and burial places their actions involve, and the schemes that turn private desire into public risk.

A Setting for Local Encounters

The episodes place Pistoia at different scales. The tale of Ricciardo il Zima opens by identifying Francesco Vergellesi as a gentleman of the Vergellesi family in Pistoia. The later episode calls Pistoia a city and places Francesca de' Lazzari there, along with the grave of Scannadio outside the church of the Order of Friars Minor. Together these details locate the stories in a recognizable civic world: wealthy householders, a beautiful widow, young men living away from their home city, a servant carrying messages, and a burial place that becomes essential to a stratagem.

Pistoia also links characters whose origins and situations differ. Ricciardo il Zima is a rich young man of modest family, while Francesco Vergellesi is wealthy, well-connected, and preparing to take up the provostship of Milan. In Francesca’s story, Rinuccio Palermini and Alessandro Chiarmontesi are Florentines living in Pistoia because they have been banished from Florence. The city is thus both home to local households and a place of residence for outsiders. These circumstances give the setting a role in bringing together people who would otherwise be separated by family standing, political displacement, or private longing.

The Palfrey and the Proposed Conversation

In the third day’s story, Francesco Vergellesi is preparing for his journey to Milan but has not found a palfrey handsome enough for his purposes. Ricciardo il Zima possesses one of the finest palfreys in Tuscany, and people tell Francesco that he may obtain it because Ricciardo loves his wife. Francesco, exceptionally covetous despite being otherwise wealthy and prudent, summons Ricciardo and asks to buy the horse, expecting that the young man will offer it as a gift.

Ricciardo accepts the prospect of giving the palfrey, but attaches a condition: before Francesco takes it, he must be allowed to speak with Francesco’s wife in her husband’s presence, at a distance from everyone else so that no one but she can hear. The bargain makes the horse more than a valuable possession. It is the means by which Ricciardo secures access to a conversation otherwise denied to him, while Francesco’s greed leads him to accept terms he believes he can control.

Francesco then goes to his wife and instructs her not to answer Ricciardo at all. She objects, but, because she must follow her husband’s wishes, agrees to come and listen. The arrangement separates hearing from speaking: Francesco permits the encounter because he expects silence to make it harmless, while Ricciardo has obtained the opportunity to address the woman he has long courted. Pistoia is the scene of a transaction whose apparent simplicity depends on unequal assumptions about what a conversation can accomplish.

Francesca’s Test of Her Suitors

In another Pistoian episode, Francesca de' Lazzari is a beautiful widow, and two Florentine exiles, Rinuccio Palermini and Alessandro Chiarmontesi, are passionately in love with her. Unaware of one another’s pursuit, each privately makes efforts to win her favor. Francesca has sometimes listened to their messages, but she now wishes to withdraw from them discreetly. Rather than continue receiving their entreaties, she plans to ask each for a service that, she expects, neither man will perform. Refusal would give her a plausible reason to end their approaches.

The opportunity comes from the death that very day of Scannadio, a man notorious in Pistoia for his wickedness and frightening appearance. He has been buried in a tomb outside the church of the Order of Friars Minor. Francesca tells her maid that his burial and reputation can be used to test the two men’s professions of devotion. Her proposed scheme depends on a vivid reversal: one suitor is to be told that Francesca is ready to grant his desire if he will enter Scannadio’s tomb, put on the dead man’s clothes, and remain there until he is fetched and carried to her house.

The request turns the city’s burial place into an instrument of courtship and refusal. Francesca does not simply reject her suitors; she designs a trial that makes their willingness to serve her, and their fear of the task, the measure of their claims. The account also begins her maid’s instructions concerning Rinuccio, establishing that the test is intended for both men. The supplied passage ends during those instructions, so it does not establish the complete course or outcome of the scheme.

Pistoia’s Narrative Function

Across the two episodes, Pistoia hosts different forms of negotiation. Ricciardo’s bargain is public enough to involve a horse, its owner, and the husband who hopes to acquire it, yet its purpose is an intimate exchange beyond the hearing of others. Francesca’s plan moves in the opposite direction: a private wish to escape unwanted attention becomes a staged ordeal involving her maid, two suitors, and a named dead man. In each case, the characters use an object or circumstance already present in Pistoia—the palfrey in one story, Scannadio’s tomb in the other—to alter the terms of a relationship.

The city’s significance lies less in physical description than in this concentration of encounters. Its households, social distinctions, the presence of banished Florentines, and the burial ground provide the conditions under which desire can be bargained over, tested, or evaded. Pistoia therefore functions as an active narrative setting: not a backdrop with a developed topography, but the place where private intentions acquire practical form and where the consequences of a seemingly limited request begin to unfold.