The Second Day of the Decameron

The Second Day of the Decameron makes Fortune’s reversals its organizing principle: people lose safety, money, or family, then struggle toward outcomes that could not have been predicted from their lowest moments. The day’s stories mingle misadventure with love, but their endings do not all offer the same measure of repair. As the storytellers observe, hearing of hardship can make the fortunate wary and console the unhappy; a return to prosperity may be joyful without erasing the bitterness that preceded it.

The Day’s Governing Pattern

Pampinea introduces the subject through reflection on Fortune’s dealings. Her account of the three young men’s losses and their nephew’s rise prompts her to argue that repeated discussion of Fortune can awaken minds that grow complacent under her favors. Such stories, she says, make the happy more cautious and offer comfort to those who suffer. The principle is not simply that adversity will be rewarded: the stories place characters inside unpredictable circumstances and let their choices, encounters, and changing fortunes shape what recovery can mean.

At the transition to another story, Lauretta draws out the scale of the reversal in Pampinea’s tale. She identifies the movement from the lowest misery to royal estate as an exceptional feat of Fortune, while acknowledging that the next story will contain still greater distress but a less splendid outcome. That contrast establishes a measure more complicated than a happy ending. The degree of suffering and the brilliance of the resolution do not necessarily rise together.

Loss, Risk, and Material Recovery

The Second Day opens its surviving sequence with Rinaldo d'Asti, whose robbery leaves him seeking refuge at Castel Guglielmo. There a widow entertains him hospitably; he makes good his loss and returns home safe. The episode places hospitality between misfortune and recovery: safety and restored means arrive through another person’s welcome, not through the traveler’s power alone. Filostrato presents the tale as a mixture of misadventure and love, suitable, he suggests, for listeners journeying through the perilous territory of love.

Pampinea’s story moves from a family’s extravagance to its restoration. Three young men squander their substance and become poor. Their nephew Alessandro, returning home in desperation, encounters an abbot who proves to be the king’s daughter of England. She takes Alessandro as her husband and makes good his uncles’ losses, restoring them to good estate. Agolante recovers what was due to him and his brothers and returns to Florence exceedingly rich; before that, Count Alessandro has knighted him. The account even preserves a further report that Alessandro later conquered Scotland and became its king. Private recovery thus expands into public elevation, though the final claim is explicitly presented as something some people say.

Landolfo Ruffolo’s fortune turns through a more dangerous chain. Having grown poor, he becomes a corsair; the Genoese take him, and a shipwreck leaves him to save himself on a coffer full of precious jewels. A woman in Corfu entertains him, and he eventually returns home rich. The jewel-filled coffer makes survival and wealth inseparable: what carries Landolfo through catastrophe also becomes the means of his material recovery. Unlike Alessandro’s rise through marriage and kinship, his return depends on an object encountered amid disaster and on hospitality after the wreck.

Fortune’s Reversals and Family Reunion

Andreuccio di Pietro’s story ends with escape from a tomb and a changed purpose. He gets out with a ring on his finger, reaches the seashore, and returns to his inn, where his companions and the host have been concerned for him throughout the night. On the host’s advice, he leaves Naples at once and returns to Perugia. He had come to buy horses; instead, his money has been invested in a ring. The ending converts a perilous night into an altered possession and a hurried departure, a smaller but pointed form of recovery.

The story of Beritola Caracciola stretches misfortune across separation, exile, and political upheaval. After losing her two sons, she is found on a deserted island with two kids and later goes to Lunigiana. One son, serving the lord of the country, lies with that lord’s daughter and is imprisoned. After Sicily rebels against King Charles, the young man is recognized by his mother; he marries the lord’s daughter, and his brother is found as well. The family is restored to high estate. The reunion is made bodily and emotional when Beritola recognizes Giannotto through the remembered features of his boyhood and runs to embrace him, overcome so completely that she falls into his arms as if dead. He recognizes her in turn, receives her weeping, and kisses her tenderly. The recognition repairs separation, but its intensity shows that restoration arrives after prolonged grief, not in place of it.

Storytelling as Consolation and Measure

The storytellers make the audience’s response part of the day’s meaning. After Andreuccio’s adventures, Emilia describes accounts of Fortune as an awakening for minds liable to fall asleep under her blandishments; they can counsel those who are happy and console those who are not. She calls Beritola’s story true and pitiful even though it has a joyful ending, doubting that later gladness could readily assuage so much and such long-lasting bitterness. Joyful resolution is therefore not treated as a simple cancellation of suffering.

Across the examples, recovery takes different forms: Rinaldo returns safe after hospitality, Alessandro’s family regains its estate, Landolfo comes home rich, Andreuccio escapes with a ring instead of horses, and Beritola’s family is reunited and restored to rank. The succession makes Fortune’s power visible precisely because no single remedy governs it. Material restitution, escape, welcome, marriage, and recognition each answer a different loss, while the storytellers’ commentary keeps the cost of those losses in view.