Zeppa di Mino

Zeppa di Mino is one of two close companions whose apparent brotherhood is tested when Zeppa discovers that Spinelloccio Tanena has been sleeping with his wife. In Fiammetta’s story, his response is neither public accusation nor violent punishment. He chooses a private, deliberately reciprocal revenge, then accepts an arrangement that turns the breach of trust into a new, if unconventional, bond among all four people.

Identity and setting

Zeppa is a young man of comfortable means and a good Sienese family. He lives in Camollia, where he and Spinelloccio are next-door neighbours. The two men associate constantly and, to appearances, love one another like brothers, or more closely still. Each has a very fair wife. That intimacy makes Spinelloccio’s conduct more than an isolated marital betrayal: it violates a friendship that had seemed to promise unusual trust.

The story does not supply a separate history for Zeppa or describe his life beyond this household and friendship. Instead, it introduces him through the contrast between the companions’ public closeness and the private affair concealed inside their homes. The domestic rooms where they visit one another become the setting in which that contradiction is exposed and, eventually, negotiated.

Discovery and restraint

Spinelloccio’s frequent visits to Zeppa’s house, whether Zeppa is present or away, lead him to become so familiar with Zeppa’s wife that the two begin an affair. They continue for some time without anyone discovering it. One day Zeppa is at home, though his wife does not know it. When Spinelloccio arrives, she says her husband is away. Spinelloccio goes directly upstairs; finding her alone in the sitting room, he embraces and kisses her, and she returns his affection.

Zeppa sees them. He makes no sign, but remains concealed as the pair go, still embracing, into a chamber and lock the door. He is deeply angered, yet he does not burst in, raise an alarm, or turn the encounter into a public spectacle. He reasons that an outcry will not undo the injury and will only increase the shame. Instead, he waits until Spinelloccio has left and considers how to satisfy his sense of injury without making the affair widely known. His concealment gives him time to act deliberately, and his first response to betrayal is to control the circumstances in which it will be answered.

When he enters the chamber, his wife has not finished putting her head-veils back in order after Spinelloccio has pulled them down while courting her. Zeppa confronts her with what he has seen. After discussion, she admits her familiarity with Spinelloccio and begs her husband’s pardon. Zeppa does not immediately pronounce a punishment. He makes forgiveness conditional on her following exact instructions, turning her confession into the means by which he can stage his response.

The chest and the counterstroke

Zeppa tells his wife to arrange for Spinelloccio to come to her the next morning, around tierce, after finding a reason to part from Zeppa. When Zeppa returns, she is to hide Spinelloccio in a chest and lock him inside. He promises that he will not hurt him. His wife agrees, and carries out the plan. The chest becomes the physical centre of the retaliation: it conceals the affair’s original participant while making him an unwilling witness to the consequences of his own conduct.

The next morning, while the two men are together, Spinelloccio says he must leave early to dine with a friend and discuss a matter of business. Zeppa points out that it is not yet dinnertime, but Spinelloccio insists on going. He takes a circuitous route to Zeppa’s house and joins Zeppa’s wife in a chamber. When she hears Zeppa arrive, she pretends to be alarmed and follows the instruction to lock her lover in the chest.

Zeppa then asks his wife to call Spinelloccio’s wife to dine with them, explaining that Spinelloccio has gone out to eat with a friend and has left her alone. The invitation brings the second wife into the house without revealing the trap. Zeppa welcomes her, takes her by the hand, and leads her into the chamber. Once inside, he locks the door. Her protest makes clear that she understands this as a betrayal of the friendship between the two men, but Zeppa explains that Spinelloccio has slept with his wife and that he intends to answer the injury in kind. He says he will not otherwise punish Spinelloccio, but warns that he will make both spouses regret the affront if she refuses.

Spinelloccio’s wife eventually agrees, provided that she and Zeppa’s wife can remain at peace with one another afterward. Zeppa promises that they can, and offers her a precious jewel. He then sleeps with her on top of the chest in which Spinelloccio is imprisoned. The promised jewel is not a separate ornament: when Zeppa opens the door and calls for his wife, he identifies the trapped Spinelloccio as the jewel he has promised. The joke depends on the literal object concealing a man who has heard and felt what happened above him.

Reconciliation and narrative role

Spinelloccio and his wife are both exposed when the chest is opened. Spinelloccio is ashamed to see Zeppa, knowing that Zeppa knows what he has done; his wife is equally abashed, aware that her husband has heard and felt the encounter. Yet Spinelloccio does not answer with a new quarrel. He recognizes that the first offence was his and that Zeppa has acted within the terms of a reciprocal retaliation while, as he sees it, treating him humanely as a companion. He proposes that they remain friends and share their wives, since, in his formulation, the wives are the only thing the two men have not shared.

Zeppa accepts. The four dine together in complete harmony, and the story says that thereafter each woman has two husbands and each man two wives, with no further strife or grudge between them. The ending does not restore the original boundary of exclusive marriage or pretend that the betrayal never happened. Instead, the men convert the affair into an explicit shared arrangement. Zeppa’s scheme first makes the hidden imbalance visible, then uses matching injuries to produce a settlement that both couples can inhabit.

The episode presents Zeppa’s ingenuity as a form of measured retaliation. He restrains his initial anger, avoids the public shame he fears an outcry would bring, and designs a revenge that mirrors Spinelloccio’s offence rather than exceeding it. The chest, the staged invitation, and the promised jewel make the punishment comic as well as consequential: Spinelloccio is not harmed physically, but is forced to witness Zeppa’s answer from inside the very household whose trust he violated. The final shared meal supplies the story’s decisive reversal, changing apparent brotherhood from a cover for secrecy into an arrangement openly accepted by the two men.