Folco

Folco is a wealthy young man whose part in an elopement plot turns a promise of shared pleasure into a chain of jealousy, coercion, murder, and flight. He first joins Restagnone’s scheme to take three sisters to Crete, where their escape appears to bring them a life of abundance. But when the lovers’ new freedom fails to preserve their attachments, Folco’s love for Maddalena becomes entangled with violence, and his final departure with Ninetta leaves others to bear the cost of what he has done.

Identity and Introduction

Folco enters the story as a rich young companion of Ughetto. Their fathers are dead, and each young man is in love with one of the daughters of Narnald Cluada, a wealthy merchant absent on business in Spain. Folco loves Maddalena; Ughetto loves her younger sister Bertella. The third sister, Ninetta, is already secretly involved with Restagnone, a young man of gentle birth but limited means. This arrangement gives Folco a place within a group of three couples, but it is Restagnone, not Folco, who devises the plan that binds their fortunes together.

The Elopement and Life in Crete

Restagnone presents the lovers’ difficulty as one that money and cooperation can solve. He proposes that Folco and Ughetto pool their wealth with him, leave with the three sisters, and establish a shared life elsewhere. Folco and Ughetto agree. They sell land under the pretext of going into trade, turn their other goods into money, and secretly equip a light brigantine for the voyage. Their preparations make Folco an active participant in the escape: he commits his wealth and accepts the concealment on which the plan depends.

Ninetta, who knows her sisters’ feelings, persuades Maddalena and Bertella to take part. On the appointed night the sisters remove money and jewels from their father’s coffer, meet their lovers, and put out to sea. The party reaches Genoa the following evening and continues from port to port, arriving in Crete before the eighth day. Near Candia they acquire substantial estates and build handsome houses. The three couples live in luxury, with servants, hounds, hawks, and horses, and pass their days in feasting and merrymaking. For a time, Folco’s investment in Restagnone’s plan seems to have succeeded: escape has replaced family authority, and wealth has made a life of leisure possible.

Fractured Attachments and the Duke’s Intervention

The settlement does not hold. Once Restagnone can enjoy Ninetta without restraint, his desire wanes; after meeting a local woman he finds attractive, he courts her with entertainments and attentions. Ninetta discovers his pursuit and becomes consumed by jealousy, watching his movements and reproaching him. Restagnone dies of poison, and the duke, seeking to learn how he died, has Ninetta seized. Without torture, she reveals what he wants to know. The love that helped bring the three couples to Crete has now become the source of a criminal inquiry, and the party’s private life is exposed to the duke’s authority.

Folco and Ughetto learn through the duke that Ninetta has been taken, and they understand that she may be condemned to the fire. Folco’s concern is part of a wider effort to save her: he and Ughetto, as well as their respective lovers, try to prevent the sentence, but the duke remains determined to enforce justice. His determination is complicated by his own desire for Maddalena. She has been courted by him for a long time without yielding, but now offers to comply with his wishes if he will return Ninetta unharmed and keep the bargain secret. The duke agrees. He secretly meets Maddalena, stages Ninetta’s supposed removal in a sack and drowning at sea, then returns Ninetta to her sister the next morning.

Murder, Deception, and Flight

Folco and Ughetto are released after hearing the report that Ninetta has been drowned. They return home believing her dead and intending to console their lovers. Folco soon discovers, however, that Ninetta is alive and being concealed in Maddalena’s palace. He is astonished, and his suspicion sharpens when he recalls the duke’s desire for Maddalena. When he asks how Ninetta came to be there, Maddalena invents an explanation, but Folco does not believe her and forces her to confess what happened.

The disclosure ends in violence. Overcome with chagrin and inflamed with rage, Folco draws his sword and kills Maddalena as she pleads for mercy. He then fears the duke’s anger and the justice that may follow. Rather than remain to answer for the murder, he tells Ninetta that he will take her to the place her sister had supposedly arranged. He presents departure as a way to keep her from falling again into the duke’s hands. Ninetta, frightened and believing him, leaves with Folco at night without taking leave of Maddalena. He gathers the little money he can lay hands on, and the two reach the shore and board a vessel. Their destination is never learned.

Consequences and Narrative Role

Folco’s escape does not settle the consequences of Maddalena’s death. When her body is found, people who envy and hate Ughetto accuse him to the duke. The duke seizes Ughetto and Bertella, who know nothing of the murder or of Folco and Ninetta’s departure, and forces them to confess themselves guilty along with Folco. They fear execution and bribe their guards with money they had kept hidden for emergencies; escaping by night, they reach Rhodes without time to take their possessions. They live there in poverty and distress. Folco, by contrast, disappears with Ninetta, and the story supplies no account of what becomes of them.

His role is therefore defined as much by a sequence of reversals as by the original elopement. He helps turn wealth into the means of escape, but the new household’s abundance cannot prevent Restagnone’s waning desire, Ninetta’s jealousy, or the duke’s intervention. In the final crisis Folco first acts within a collective effort to save Ninetta, then kills the sister who has secured her release, and finally uses the danger he helped create to persuade Ninetta to flee with him. The closing judgment links Restagnone’s reckless love and Ninetta’s rage to the ruin of themselves and others; Folco’s killing of Maddalena and flight show how that ruin spreads beyond the original lovers.