The Marriage of Andrevuola and Gabriotto

The Marriage of Andrevuola and Gabriotto is a secret union between a noblewoman and a man of lower social standing, tested almost immediately by Gabriotto’s sudden death. Their relationship moves from a love sustained in private to a marriage Andrevuola insists must be honored in public: she protects his body, withstands an official’s coercion, and secures her father’s recognition of him as a son-in-law. Her eventual refusal to marry the provost makes fidelity to Gabriotto the defining bond of her life.

Unequal standing, mutual love

In Brescia, Andrevuola is the young, unmarried, beautiful daughter of Messer Negro da Ponte Carraro, a gentleman with several children. Gabriotto, her neighbor, is a man of modest condition, but the story presents him as accomplished in character, pleasant in appearance, and agreeable in manner. Their difference in rank matters: her parents cherish their only surviving child and hope to make a socially advantageous match for her, while Gabriotto has no comparable standing in the family’s plans.

With help from a serving maid who knows their secret, Andrevuola arranges for Gabriotto to visit her father’s garden. The garden becomes the private setting of a love they choose and sustain together, beyond her family’s knowledge. Their meetings are not described as a casual affair: to prevent anything other than death from separating them, they secretly become husband and wife. The marriage is established in private, but its secrecy leaves Andrevuola to defend both their bond and Gabriotto’s honor when death brings their hidden life into public view.

Dreams and the sudden death

One night Andrevuola dreams that she is embracing Gabriotto in the garden when a dark, frightening shape tears him from her arms and carries him underground. She wakes relieved that the dream was not real, yet afraid of what it might foretell. When Gabriotto wants to visit the following night, she tries to prevent his coming; unwilling to have him suspect another cause, she receives him after all.

She tells him the dream beside a clear fountain, among roses they have gathered. Gabriotto dismisses dreams as unreliable and recounts his own: in a wood he has captured a beautiful white hind, familiar to him and bound by a golden collar and chain. As the hind rests with its head in his lap, a ravenous black greyhound attacks him, reaches his heart, and tears it away. He wakes in pain but finds nothing wrong, and urges them to set the dream aside. The parallel visions give their meeting an ominous structure: Andrevuola fears a force taking Gabriotto from her, while his dream imagines an animal tearing out his heart.

Andrevuola hides her alarm so as not to trouble him. As they embrace and kiss, she watches his face more intently than usual and looks around the garden for anything black. Then Gabriotto sighs, asks her for help, and collapses on the grass. He is sweating and panting; he cannot answer her, and dies soon afterward in her lap. The earlier dreams acquire meaning only after this irreversible loss. Physicians later determine that an imposthume near his heart burst and suffocated him; they find no evidence that he was poisoned or otherwise killed.

A wife’s care and public resistance

Grief-stricken, Andrevuola first tells her maid, who has shared in keeping the lovers’ secret. She says she cannot bear to go on living without Gabriotto, but also wants to preserve the honor and secrecy of their love and ensure that his body is buried. The maid counsels against suicide and suggests either burying him discreetly in the garden or leaving him where his family might find him. Andrevuola rejects the idea of letting her husband be buried like a dog or left in the street. Even in her grief, she treats him as her husband and insists that his kin deserve the chance to mourn him.

She spreads a piece of silk cloth on the ground, lays his body upon it with his head on a pillow, closes his eyes and mouth, and makes him a chaplet of roses. She and the maid cover him with the flowers they gathered together. Andrevuola then proposes carrying him to his family’s house and laying him before the door before daybreak. Before they set out, she removes the ring with which Gabriotto had espoused her and places it on his finger as her last gift. She collapses in a swoon, then rises and helps carry his body from the garden.

Officers of the provostry encounter the women with the body. Andrevuola does not try to flee: she agrees to appear before the Seignory and explain what happened, but warns them not to touch her or remove anything from the body while she is obediently going with them. At the palace she answers the inquiry into Gabriotto’s death, and the physicians’ finding confirms that he died of natural causes. The provost then tries to use her vulnerability for his own ends, offering to release her if she yields to him and threatening force when she refuses. Andrevuola resists him with indignation and scorn. Her conduct transforms the private wife who guarded a secret into a woman openly defending her own person and her husband’s dignity before authority.

Recognition, mourning, and the ending

When Messer Negro arrives, the provost reports what happened, including his own attempted coercion. He praises Andrevuola’s constancy and proposes marrying her himself, despite Gabriotto’s lower social condition. Andrevuola instead addresses her father directly. She asks forgiveness for having married the man she chose without his knowledge, but makes clear that she seeks to die as his daughter, not as his enemy. Her appeal is not a withdrawal of her choice: it asks her father to recognize that choice and the marriage it created.

Messer Negro responds with grief and tenderness. He says he would have preferred a husband of the rank he thought suitable for her, but regrets more deeply that she felt unable to confide in him—and that he learned of the marriage only after Gabriotto was dead. Had Gabriotto lived, he says, he would gladly have honored him as a son-in-law; since he is dead, that honor will still be given. He orders a great funeral for him.

Gabriotto’s kin arrive, and many townspeople join the mourning. His body lies in the courtyard on Andrevuola’s silk cloth, strewn with the roses she and Gabriotto gathered. The funeral procession carries him to his grave on the shoulders of the city’s most distinguished citizens, honoring him as if he were a nobleman. This public recognition answers the social distinction that had shadowed the marriage: Andrevuola’s father grants Gabriotto the family honor he would have received in life, and the city’s mourning extends that recognition beyond the household.

The provost renews his proposal after the funeral, but Andrevuola will not accept it. With her father’s willingness to respect her decision, she and the maid enter a convent and live there honorably for many years. The marriage therefore ends not in a shared future but in the lasting consequences of Andrevuola’s fidelity. The ring, roses, silk shroud, and public funeral trace a passage from concealed union to acknowledged wifehood: although death ends the couple’s life together, it does not erase the marriage or the honor she insists it deserves.