Bentivegna del Mazzo

Bentivegna del Mazzo is a husbandman in Varlungo and the husband of Mistress Belcolore. Though he is not the focus of the episode, his departure for Florence opens the way for the parish priest’s advances, and his trust helps the priest retrieve a cloak without revealing the intimacy behind the pledge. Bentivegna’s brief appearances make him a hinge of the plot: his ordinary errands and easy confidence enable a deception he does not recognize.

Identity and Household

Bentivegna is introduced as a countryman who styles himself a husbandman. When the priest meets him at noon, Bentivegna is driving an ass laden with gear toward Florence on business. He explains that he has been summoned by the police-court judge through the judge’s proctor and is carrying the goods to a squire who may help him. The detail places him within the practical business of village life: he travels with a working animal, carries equipment, and seeks assistance with a legal matter.

His household is also connected to the priest through ordinary exchanges. The priest has cultivated Mistress Belcolore’s goodwill with small garden produce and other attentions, while Bentivegna himself is away. Before Bentivegna sets out, the priest asks him to pass a message to Lapuccio or Naldino about straps for his flails. Bentivegna agrees readily. The request sounds like routine business, but it helps establish the priest’s familiar access to the household and underscores how little Bentivegna suspects about his purpose.

The Absence That Opens an Opportunity

When Bentivegna has gone toward Florence, the priest hurries to Mistress Belcolore’s house. She is in the hayloft and comes down to pick over cabbage seed. The priest makes his desire plain and offers her gifts; she counters that, if he wants her favor, he should do her a service. She needs five crowns to redeem a watchet gown and her Sunday girdle from pawn before going to Florence to return spun wool and have her spinning-wheel mended.

The negotiation produces a pledge rather than the money she requests. The priest leaves his cloak with her as security, intending to return with the crowns. Bentivegna is not present for this exchange and is not shown learning of it. His absence matters not because he actively arranges the encounter, but because his departure gives the priest a private opportunity and leaves him outside the bargain that follows.

The Cloak and Bentivegna’s Misreading

The priest later regrets leaving the cloak as a pledge and devises a way to get it back. He asks a neighbor’s boy to borrow Mistress Belcolore’s stone mortar, then sends his clerk to return it at a time when she and Bentivegna are eating together. The clerk carries the priest’s request that she return the cloak the boy had left as a token. Bentivegna reacts angrily to the idea that his wife has taken a pledge from the priest. He orders her to give it back and says that, in future, she must not refuse the priest whatever he asks of their household—even their ass.

Mistress Belcolore returns the cloak, but answers with a resentful message that she will not lend the priest her mortar again. Bentivegna interprets her words as a complaint prompted by his own scolding and takes no heed of their real context. The episode thus distinguishes what he hears from what the reader knows: he believes he is correcting his wife’s handling of a pledge, while the exchange conceals the priest’s private bargain and his effort to undo it.

Narrative Role and Aftermath

Bentivegna’s importance lies in the contrast between his confidence and his ignorance. His willingness to let the priest ask for anything from the household gives the priest an easy way to recover the cloak; his failure to question the odd exchange leaves the deception intact. The story does not establish that Bentivegna discovers the affair or understands the priest’s motives. Instead, it shows him misreading the moment and moving on, while Mistress Belcolore bears the grievance herself and keeps the priest at a distance until vintage-time. She eventually makes peace with him over must and roast chestnuts, and the two resume their meetings. Bentivegna remains outside that later reconciliation, a domestic presence whose trust has helped the episode proceed without his awareness.