Dom Gianni di Barolo

Dom Gianni di Barolo is a priest who supplements a poor living by trading at fairs, and the central figure in Dioneo’s comic tale of a conjuration interrupted at its most consequential moment. His friendship with Pietro da Tresanti gives him a place in Pietro’s home; his claim that he can turn his mare into a woman turns that hospitality into an absurd experiment involving Pietro’s wife, Gemmata. The story makes Dom Gianni’s supposed magic inseparable from sexual comedy, practical need, and the danger of taking a verbal instruction too literally.

Identity and Livelihood

Dom Gianni serves as a priest in Barletta, but his cure is too poor to support him adequately. He therefore travels through the fairs of Apulia, buying and selling merchandise with the help of his mare. The detail makes him both a cleric and a working itinerant: his livelihood depends not only on his religious office but on commercial travel and the animal that carries him from fair to fair.

The story introduces him not through a public religious act but through this practical routine. His mare is at once his means of trade and the object around which his extraordinary claim will turn. The contrast between the modest economics of his life and the grand promise of transforming a human being into a beast supplies the tale with its comic scale: a poor priest’s supposed marvel is brought into the cramped, ordinary circumstances of lodging and household exchange.

Friendship and Reciprocal Hospitality

On his journeys, Dom Gianni forms a close friendship with Pietro da Tresanti, who trades in the same way, though with an ass. Dom Gianni calls him his gossip, a term of affection in their Apulian usage. When Pietro visits Barletta, the priest lodges and entertains him as well as he can. Pietro reciprocates when Dom Gianni comes to Tresanti, welcoming him despite his own poverty and small house.

That reciprocity has a physical limit: Pietro has only one poor bed, which he shares with his young wife, while Dom Gianni’s mare is stabled with Pietro’s ass and the priest himself sleeps on a truss of straw beside the animals. Gemmata, mindful of the hospitality Dom Gianni gives her husband, repeatedly offers to sleep at a neighbor’s house so that the guest can take her place in the bed. Dom Gianni refuses. The refusal preserves the surface of considerate friendship, but it also sets up his claim that he already has a way to enjoy a woman’s company without needing to displace his friend.

The Claimed Transformation

Dom Gianni tells Gemmata that, whenever he wishes, he can change his mare into a handsome young woman, lie with her, and then turn her back into a mare. Gemmata believes him and tells Pietro. Rather than dismissing the claim, Pietro asks his friend to teach him the charm, imagining that he might turn Gemmata into a mare and use her together with his ass and the priest’s mare, gaining two animals for one. His proposal reveals how thoroughly the tale’s characters take the supposed magic as a practical means of improving their circumstances.

Dom Gianni tries to cure Pietro of the idea, but when that fails he agrees to demonstrate the procedure the following morning. He warns that fitting the tail is the most difficult part. In the dim, private setting of Pietro’s house, his promise of transformation becomes a staged ritual: Dom Gianni’s authority as the supposed magician depends on Pietro and Gemmata accepting his directions and remaining silent while he performs it.

The Interrupted Conjuration

Before daybreak, Pietro and Gemmata, who have scarcely slept for impatience, summon Dom Gianni. He gives Pietro a light to hold and tells both of them that the operation will succeed only if they obey him. His central instruction is that they must say nothing, whatever they see or hear. He then has Gemmata undress and take the position of a mare, and proceeds by touching parts of her body while naming them as a mare’s head, mane, legs, chest, and other features.

The performance changes in character as it reaches its final step. When Dom Gianni is about to attach the tail, Pietro objects aloud, insisting that he will not have one put there. Dom Gianni immediately declares that Pietro’s speech has ruined the transformation and that it cannot be done again. The supposed spell’s failure thus hinges not on a shortage of ceremony but on a breach of the one rule that the magician had made essential: Pietro speaks at the moment when Dom Gianni has told him to be silent.

The interruption leaves the claimed transformation unverified. Gemmata stands up, dresses, and rebukes Pietro for spoiling the affair, pointing out that a mare without a tail would be absurd. Pietro, however, maintains his objection to where Dom Gianni was going to put it. The comedy rests on the clash between the ritual’s elaborate appearance and its plainly sexual action, as well as on the couple’s incompatible understandings of what the final step should accomplish.

Ending and Narrative Function

After the failed demonstration, Pietro continues his old trade with his ass. He travels with Dom Gianni to the fair at Bitonto, but never again asks the priest to perform such a service. The friendship and commercial routine continue; what ends is Pietro’s attempt to turn his wife into an animal through Dom Gianni’s supposed art.

As Dioneo presents him, Dom Gianni is defined less by a confirmed supernatural power than by the comic authority he claims and the conditions he imposes on those who trust him. The story gives no independent proof that his mare ever became a woman. Instead, it lets his confident explanation, the ritual’s bodily particulars, and Pietro’s untimely objection carry the joke. Dom Gianni’s role is therefore both magician in the tale’s premise and master of a verbal setup whose success depends on silence. The final failure exposes how fragile that authority is: one spoken protest is enough to end the conjuration, and the friendship returns to the fairs without another attempt.