The ill hole will have no holidays

The ill hole will have no holidays is Ricciardo di Chinzica’s sole repeated answer after Bartolomea refuses to leave Paganino and return to him. The phrase turns his defeat into a sexual joke: while Paganino satisfies Bartolomea, Ricciardo’s old rules and belated promises cannot persuade her to go back.

The phrase in its story

After Bartolomea rejects Ricciardo, he leaves her and returns to Pisa, grieving and humiliated. As he goes about the city, whoever greets him or asks him anything receives the same response: “The ill hole will have no holidays.” The story makes the refrain a comic afterlife of his failed visit: he cannot change her mind, but he can repeat a saying that names the sexual contrast on which her refusal rests.

Meaning and wordplay

The accompanying note explains that “ill hole” is a sexual euphemism for a woman’s private parts. It gives the Latin gloss Cunnus nonvult feriari, presenting the expression as a claim that the sexual organ does not take holidays. The bawdy language makes the phrase’s meaning deliberately plain, while its form as a short, repeated saying converts Ricciardo’s private humiliation into public comic speech.

Ricciardo’s defeat and the ending

The refrain follows Bartolomea’s contrast between life with Paganino and her earlier marriage to Ricciardo: she says that Paganino holds and embraces her through the night, whereas Ricciardo’s assurances that he will now satisfy her arrive too late. She refuses to return even if Paganino should leave her, and threatens to cry out if Ricciardo persists. The narrative then reports that Ricciardo dies not long afterward, still associated with the saying he has repeated around Pisa. Paganino, knowing Bartolomea loves him, marries her lawfully; the two live happily without observing saints’ days, vigils, or Lent. The refrain thus marks not only Ricciardo’s rejection but the story’s irreverent reversal of the religious calendar into a joke about uninterrupted sexual life.

A disputed secondary reading

A note on the phrase records that some commentators propose hearing il mal furo, or “the ill thief,” instead, as an allusion to Paganino. The note calls that interpretation far-fetched and favors the sexual sense. The alternative matters chiefly as a record of how the wording invited competing explanations; in the story’s context, Ricciardo’s repeated line follows Bartolomea’s explicit comparison of the two men and the life she chooses with Paganino.