Federigo’s poverty

Federigo’s poverty transforms a failed courtship into the defining test of his character. Once celebrated in Florence for arms and courtesy, Federigo degli Alberighi spends his fortune trying to win Madam Giovanna, who does not return his devotion. When his resources are gone, the contrast between his former display and his reduced circumstances exposes what wealth had concealed: not a loss of worth, but the persistence of generosity when he can no longer afford to perform it lavishly.

From courtly expenditure to poverty

As Coppo di Borghese Domenichi tells the story, Federigo is the son of Messer Filippo Alberighi and is renowned throughout Tuscany for his deeds of arms and courtesy. He falls in love with Madam Giovanna, then regarded as one of the fairest and most lively women in Florence. To gain her affection, he holds jousts and tournaments, gives entertainments, and makes gifts, spending without restraint. Madam Giovanna is virtuous and does not value either these costly gestures or the man who makes them; Federigo’s expenditure brings him no return in love.

His means gradually run out. The narrative presents his impoverishment as the consequence of pursuing a courtly ideal through spending far beyond his resources, not as the result of a sudden disaster. With no prospect of making the same figure in the city, and still more in love than before, Federigo withdraws to Campi, where he owns a small farm. Its returns sustain him meagrely. His remaining property includes a falcon, one of the best in the world, and he bears his reduced circumstances patiently, hawking when he can and asking nothing of anyone. The bird is at once a possession, a source of pleasure, and the last remnant of a life in which Federigo could give and entertain on a grand scale.

Poverty meets an occasion for hospitality

The change in Federigo’s circumstances becomes especially consequential when Madam Giovanna is widowed. Her husband leaves their grown son as his heir and makes her heir in the event that the boy dies without lawful issue. During the summer she and her son stay at an estate near Federigo’s farm. The boy becomes acquainted with Federigo and takes pleasure in watching his hawks and hounds; above all, he longs for Federigo’s falcon, though he hesitates to ask for a bird so dear to its owner.

When the boy falls ill, his mother repeatedly asks what might make him better. He names the falcon. Madam Giovanna knows that Federigo has long loved her and that the bird is his only remaining pleasure, but, moved by her care for her son, she resolves to visit and ask for it herself. She arrives with a companion and is received with the warmth and respect Federigo can offer. He is glad of her visit, yet the encounter makes him acutely conscious of his poverty: the woman for whom he once gave entertainments is now his guest, and he has no money, nor anything he can pawn, with which to provide an appropriate meal.

Rather than appeal to his farm labourer or seek another person’s help, Federigo looks for some way to honour his guest. Seeing the falcon on its perch, he decides that it is worthy food for Madam Giovanna. He has the bird killed, plucked, and roasted, then serves it at a table laid with the fine white cloths he still possesses. Madam Giovanna and her companion eat without knowing what has been served. The meal turns poverty into an irreversible choice: Federigo can offer hospitality, but only by sacrificing the one possession that gives his diminished life pleasure and that Madam Giovanna has come to request.

The falcon’s absence and the limits of fortune

After the meal, Madam Giovanna explains why she has come. Her son is so taken with the falcon that she fears his illness will worsen if he cannot have it. She asks Federigo for the bird, appealing to his nobility and to the possibility that the gift may help keep her son alive. Federigo weeps before he answers. At first, Madam Giovanna takes his tears for grief at being asked to part with his falcon. The real cause is more painful: he cannot grant her request because he has already given the bird to her as dinner.

Federigo explains that he had thought it fitting to honour her with the choicest food he could provide and had therefore served the falcon. To confirm the truth, he shows her its feathers, feet, and beak. The gesture is both a failure of the request and the fullest expression of his hospitality: poverty has left him no second bird and no other gift to substitute, but it has not persuaded him to receive Madam Giovanna meanly. She blames him for killing so fine a falcon to feed a woman, yet inwardly admires a greatness of spirit that his poverty has not diminished.

Madam Giovanna returns home disconsolate and uncertain whether her son will recover without the bird. Before many days pass, he dies. The narrative does not settle whether his death follows from disappointment or from the course of his illness, leaving the loss attached to an uncertainty no gift could resolve. The falcon’s sacrifice therefore brings neither the desired cure nor immediate reward: Federigo has honoured his guest, but the act cannot save the child or restore what poverty has taken from him.

Marriage, renewed fortune, and the meaning of poverty

After her son’s death, Madam Giovanna remains for a time in grief. She is young and very rich, and her brothers urge her more than once to marry again. Though she would rather remain as she is, she recalls Federigo’s character and his final act of magnificence. She tells her brothers that, if she must take another husband, she will take no one but Federigo degli Alberighi. They object that he has nothing in the world. Her answer makes the story’s distinction between a person and his property explicit: she would rather have a man lacking riches than riches lacking a man.

Her brothers know Federigo to be a man of great merit and agree to the marriage, giving Madam Giovanna and her wealth to him. Poverty thus ends not through a recovered fortune of his own but through a marriage in which his worth is recognized despite his lack of property. The final reversal also changes Federigo’s relation to wealth: having once spent recklessly to win love, he becomes more careful with his substance after marrying a woman he has loved so deeply. He and Madam Giovanna live out their days in joy and comfort.

The story makes poverty a measure of capacity rather than a simple sign of diminished character. Federigo’s reduced means restrict what he can offer, and the falcon’s fate shows the cost of trying to preserve courtesy without resources. Yet the act that appears to confirm his helplessness also reveals the generosity that ultimately wins Madam Giovanna’s esteem. His poverty is neither magically erased nor treated as proof of unworthiness; it makes visible the difference between riches and the human qualities that can outlast them.