Genoa

Genoa is a place where private fortunes are tested and where people, goods, and news pass between distant shores. In the stories of Ginevra and Beritola’s family, the city contains both a threatened household and a household of servitude; elsewhere, its merchants and envoys link it to commercial disputes and hazardous sea travel. Genoa’s significance lies less in a single civic portrait than in its repeated role as a point of arrival, departure, concealment, and return.

Genoa as a wealthy city and a stage for rebuke

In the story told by Lauretta, Genoa is home to Messer Ermino de' Grimaldi, a man reputed to possess greater wealth in lands and money than any other known rich citizen in Italy. His fortune has not made him generous. He is so miserly that he deprives himself of necessities, food, and drink rather than spend, and his fellow citizens call him Messer Ermino Avarizia instead of using his family name. His house, by contrast, is new and fine: the disparity between its visible magnificence and its owner’s habitual refusal to give becomes the setting for a pointed encounter.

Guglielmo Borsiere, a well-regarded minstrel visiting Genoa, hears accounts of Ermino’s avarice and seeks him out. Ermino receives him amicably and shows him the new house, then asks what never-before-seen thing might be painted in its hall. Borsiere answers that he cannot name such a thing, except perhaps sneezing, but can suggest something Ermino has never seen: Liberality. The rebuke turns the house into an image of what its owner lacks. Ermino is ashamed, promises to have Liberality depicted, and thereafter becomes, in the story’s account, Genoa’s most liberal and courteous gentleman, hospitable to strangers and citizens alike. The city is thus presented as a place where a public exchange of wit can alter a wealthy man’s conduct.

Merchants, marriage, and a wager about Ginevra

Genoa also anchors the domestic life that a group of Italian merchants discuss while dining together at an inn in Paris. Among them is Bernabo Lomellini, who praises his wife Ginevra as beautiful, capable, prudent, and exceptionally skilled. He describes her accomplishments in embroidery, household service, riding, falconry, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and insists that she would remain faithful even if he were absent for many years. Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza mocks this confidence and wagers that he can prove Ginevra unchaste. The dispute begins abroad, but the proof Ambrogiuolo seeks depends on entering her Genoese home.

After reaching Genoa, Ambrogiuolo learns about Ginevra’s habits and residence. He bribes a poor woman who is welcome in the household to carry him into the house concealed in a chest, which she leaves in Ginevra’s bedchamber. At night he emerges, studies the room and its furnishings, and observes Ginevra asleep beside a little girl. He finds a distinguishing mark beneath her left breast, then steals a purse, a night-rail, rings, and girdles from a coffer. He leaves without Ginevra knowing he was there. In Paris, the room’s details and the stolen possessions help persuade Bernabo that Ambrogiuolo has won; the intimate detail about the mark makes the deception seem conclusive to him, though it does not establish that Ginevra consented to anything.

The threatened household and Ginevra’s escape

On his return journey, Bernabo does not enter Genoa. He waits at a country house about twenty miles away and sends a trusted servant to summon Ginevra, secretly ordering him to kill her on the road. The servant takes her from the city on horseback. In a deep, lonely valley, he tells her of the order and explains that he fears disobeying his master. Ginevra pleads that she has done no wrong and proposes a way to spare both her life and the servant’s: he can take her clothes back and tell Bernabo that she is dead. The servant relents, gives her his doublet and hood, and leaves her money before returning to report her death.

Ginevra spends the day alone before reaching a nearby village at night. With an old woman’s help, she alters the doublet, makes linen breeches from her shift, and cuts her hair. Disguised as a sailor, she reaches the shore and enters the service of a Catalan gentleman under the name Sicurano da Finale. Her journey from Genoa is therefore not a simple departure from danger: the clothes and assumed identity she fashions there allow her to travel and find new employment. She serves her first master effectively, then accompanies him to Alexandria, where the Soldan takes her into his own service. Later, appointed captain of the guard at Acre during a merchants’ fair, she recognizes among the goods a purse and girdle stolen from her Genoese home. The objects that once served as false evidence against her become the means of finding the deceiver.

When Ginevra exposes Ambrogiuolo before the Soldan, she recounts the false accusation and attempted murder, reveals her identity, and challenges Ambrogiuolo to say when he ever lay with her. The Soldan pardons Bernabo at her request, and Ginevra forgives her husband despite the injustice he has done her. Ambrogiuolo is punished; the Soldan gives Ginevra his property, jewels, vessels, and money, and equips a ship for the couple’s return. They reach Genoa wealthy and are received with honor. Ginevra, whom the city had believed dead, is again publicly recognized as a woman of virtue. The return reverses the secret violence that drove her away: the evidence that had been used to condemn her is publicly answered, and her own account determines the outcome.

Captivity, concealment, and family recovery

Genoa is also where pirates bring the nurse and two sons of Madam Beritola Caracciola after taking the ship on which the family had traveled. The pirates leave Beritola behind, unseen, but the nurse and the children become part of the booty distributed among the owners of a galley. Messer Guasparrino d'Oria receives them and sends them to his house to serve as slaves. The nurse, fearing that recognition could put the boys in danger, tells people they are her own sons and changes the elder boy’s name from Giusfredi to Giannotto di Procida. She explains the danger to him repeatedly, and he keeps the secret.

The boys and their nurse remain in Guasparrino’s household for years, poorly clothed and assigned menial tasks. At sixteen, Giannotto leaves Genoa aboard galleys bound for Alexandria, seeking a life beyond servitude. Years later, after learning that his father may still be alive but is imprisoned by King Charles, he reaches Lunigiana and enters the service of Currado Malespina. There he encounters his mother, who is attached to Currado’s household, without either recognizing the other. Their separation from Genoa has not ended the family’s losses; it has carried them into different households and left their identities concealed even from one another.

After Giannotto is recognized as Giusfredi and reunited with Beritola, he asks Currado to find his brother and nurse, still in Guasparrino’s house, and to investigate what has happened to their father. Currado sends trusted messengers to Genoa and Sicily. Guasparrino confirms that he has kept the younger boy and nurse for fourteen years, but warns the messenger not to trust Giannotto’s claim until he hears the nurse’s account. Once she explains the concealment and the circumstances of the family’s loss, Guasparrino accepts the truth. Ashamed of the treatment the boy has received, he arranges for him to marry his eleven-year-old daughter with a substantial dowry and travels with the reunited family to meet Currado. In this plot, Genoa is where captivity and a protective alias begin, but it is also the place from which kinship can be traced and restored.

A Mediterranean point of departure and return

Other episodes make Genoa part of a wider network of travel rather than the center of a single local action. In Ginevra’s story, merchants gather in Paris, but the wager turns on access to a Genoese household, and her escape by sea eventually carries her to Alexandria and service under the Soldan. In the account of Beritola’s family, the pirates’ arrival in Genoa converts a sea seizure into enslavement in a city household; later, a messenger’s journey back to Genoa reconnects that household with the family’s history. The city’s narrative function changes with each arrival: refuge is absent for the captive family, while for Ginevra the city becomes the home to which she can return after a public vindication.

Genoese travelers and vessels also appear in the account of Torello d'Istria. Genoese ambassadors come to Alexandria to negotiate the ransom of their countrymen, and one carries Torello’s letter toward his uncle in Pavia. Later, Torello hears that the returning galleon was driven onto the Barbary quicksands and that no one aboard survived. The voyage links Genoa’s people to distant courts and to the perilous routes on which news, ransom negotiations, and family hopes depend. Across these stories, Genoa is not isolated from the wider world: its households receive displaced people, its merchants conduct business abroad, and its ships and envoys carry both opportunity and danger across the sea.