Bartolomea

Bartolomea’s story turns a calendar of religious observances into a measure of marital neglect: her husband uses holy days to restrict their intimacy, while she eventually claims the right to choose a life that answers her desires. Carried from Pisa to Monaco by the corsair Paganino da Mare, she refuses to return to Ricciardo di Chinzica and makes that refusal the decisive act of her story. Her fate is at once comic and unsettling: the marriage arranged for her gives way to a partnership she chooses, but only after abduction has removed her from her former life.

Identity and Marriage

Bartolomea is introduced as a young woman of Pisa, celebrated for her beauty and married to Ricciardo di Chinzica, a wealthy judge. Her father gives her in marriage with great ceremony. The mismatch between the spouses is apparent from the beginning: Ricciardo is more gifted in intellect than in bodily strength, and the story presents him as an old man in relation to his young bride. Their first night together nearly exhausts him; the following day he has to revive himself with malmsey, restorative confections, and other remedies.

The marriage’s central conflict is therefore present before Paganino appears. Bartolomea is described as young, vigorous, and desirous of the intimacy that Ricciardo cannot or will not provide. The narration makes her husband’s scholarly identity part of the joke: his expertise in civil law does not extend to understanding the needs of the woman he has married. The lavish wedding cannot bridge that difference.

A Marriage Governed by the Calendar

After their wedding night, Ricciardo devises a calendar to limit marital sex. He tells Bartolomea that nearly every day is sacred to one or more saints, and adds fast days, Ember Days, the vigils of apostles and other saints, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Lent, phases of the moon, and further exceptions. He presents these restrictions as religious observance, but the story shows their practical effect: Bartolomea is left waiting, and Ricciardo maintains close watch lest anyone teach her which days might be suitable instead.

The arrangement reduces intimacy to an infrequent concession. The narrator says Ricciardo handles her perhaps once a month, and hardly even that. His rules make the calendar an instrument of domestic control: religious time, rather than mutual attention, determines what can happen between husband and wife. The tale’s joke is also its accusation. Ricciardo can keep track of saints’ days with scrupulous care while failing to recognize the person sharing his bed.

From the Fishing Trip to Monaco

During a hot season, Ricciardo takes Bartolomea to his country estate near Monte Nero. To entertain her, he arranges a fishing excursion in two boats: he travels with the fishermen, while she is in another boat with other women. The boats drift several miles out to sea as the party concentrates on its sport. Paganino da Mare, a well-known corsair, comes upon them and captures the boat carrying the women. Ricciardo reaches land in time to see Bartolomea taken away but does not know who has carried her off or where she has gone.

Paganino, struck by her beauty, decides to keep her. Bartolomea weeps at first, and he tries to comfort her with words. By nightfall, the story says, Ricciardo’s calendar and its forbidden days have disappeared from Paganino’s mind. Before the journey to Monaco is over, Bartolomea has begun to live happily with him. He treats her honorably as his wife, and the contrast with her former marriage is established not through a new schedule of restrictions but through the attention and intimacy Paganino offers.

Refusal and Recognition

When Ricciardo learns where Bartolomea is, he sails to Monaco intending to pay whatever ransom Paganino demands. Paganino does not simply bargain over her: he says he will bring Ricciardo to her and let her decide whether she is his wife and wishes to return. When Bartolomea enters the room, dressed and adorned, she greets Ricciardo as if he were a stranger. Ricciardo is astonished and supposes that grief may have changed his appearance.

In private, Bartolomea admits that she recognizes him. Her public denial has bought her the chance to answer without Paganino present, but her private explanation is not an excuse or a confession of confusion. She tells Ricciardo that he understood her poorly when they lived together: she was young and lively, with needs that he had ignored. She recalls how he made himself a crier of feast days, vigils, fasts, and other prohibitions, and contrasts those observances with the unbroken intimacy she now shares with Paganino. Her comparison to the working fields makes the point concrete: Ricciardo allowed the supposed cultivator of her body fewer working days than a farmer could afford the people tilling his land.

Ricciardo appeals to her family’s honor, her own reputation, and the prospect that Paganino may eventually tire of her. He also promises to make greater efforts to satisfy her if she returns. Bartolomea rejects these arguments. She questions why her relatives’ honor should bind her when they had not protected her interests in arranging the marriage, and refuses to let Ricciardo claim concern for her reputation only after losing her. She insists that she considers herself Paganino’s wife and will remain with him. If Paganino later leaves her, she says, she will seek her own advantage elsewhere rather than return to Ricciardo.

Ending and Narrative Significance

Ricciardo leaves Monaco without Bartolomea. Back in Pisa, he is so distressed that he answers people who greet or question him with a bitter refrain about there being no holidays for the ill-fated body. He dies not long afterward. Paganino, knowing that Bartolomea loves him, marries her lawfully. The story ends with the two living happily together without observing the saints’ days, vigils, or Lent that had governed her former marriage.

Bartolomea’s decision gives the tale its reversal: the husband who tried to control intimacy through rules loses his wife, while the woman he had treated as subject to his timetable states the terms on which she will live. Her choice is sharply voiced and grounded in her own experience, not in an abstract rejection of religious observance. The narrative’s comic contrast between Ricciardo’s calendar and Paganino’s uninterrupted attentions exposes the husband’s failure to understand marriage as a relationship requiring regard for his wife. At the same time, the means by which Bartolomea reaches her new life complicates any simple account of freedom: she is first taken against her will by a corsair. The story locates her decisive agency in what follows—her refusal to be reclaimed, her explanation of why she will not return, and her final marriage to Paganino.