Ginevra escapes murder and assumes the name Sicurano after her husband, Bernabo Lomellini, accepts a fabricated claim of adultery as proof of her guilt. The escape turns an attempt to erase her into a passage toward a new identity: presumed dead by her husband, she survives by changing her clothes, her appearance, and her name, then makes her way into the service of the Soldan. Her later encounter with Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza brings the false accusation back into view and reveals how the evidence that condemned her was obtained.

The wager and the order to kill

In Paris, Ambrogiuolo had won a wager by claiming that he had slept with Ginevra. He produced her belongings and described the chamber, but Bernabo resisted treating those details as conclusive: he argued that servants might have disclosed the room and supplied the objects. Ambrogiuolo then named a distinctive mark beneath Ginevra’s left breast. Bernabo’s anguish and altered expression showed that the detail was true, and he accepted the wager as lost. The mark, however, established only Ambrogiuolo’s knowledge of Ginevra’s body; it did not establish that she had consented to him or been unfaithful.

Bernabo paid Ambrogiuolo and left Paris for Genoa with a deadly purpose. Rather than enter the city himself, he stopped at a country house about twenty miles away and sent a trusted servant to summon Ginevra. Along with the message, he gave the servant a private instruction: kill her on the journey and return. The arrangement concealed the intended violence behind an ordinary summons from her husband. Ginevra, rejoicing at the news of Bernabo’s return, rode out with the servant the next morning, unaware of the order.

The reprieve in the valley

The servant chose a deep, lonely valley, surrounded by high rocks and trees, as the place to carry out Bernabo’s command. He drew his knife, took Ginevra by the arm, and told her that she must die before going farther. Faced with the weapon, she asked what offense could warrant her death. The servant explained that she had not wronged him: Bernabo had ordered the killing, threatened him with hanging if he disobeyed, and left him feeling bound by service and obligation.

Ginevra answered not with a denial of the danger but with a way to escape it. She urged the servant not to become a murderer in order to serve another man, and proposed that he take her clothes back to Bernabo as proof of her death. In return, she would leave the country and ensure that no news of her reached either the servant or her husband. The servant, moved by compassion and already reluctant to kill her, accepted. He gave her his shabby doublet and hood, left her some of the money she carried, and departed with her clothes.

To make Bernabo believe the order had been fulfilled, the servant reported that he had left Ginevra’s dead body among wolves. He then returned to his master. Ginevra, by contrast, remained alive and alone in the valley. The separation was decisive: Bernabo received a false report that closed off his search for her, while she had to turn survival into a complete break with her former identity.

From Ginevra to Sicurano

Ginevra waited until nightfall, then went to a nearby village. An old woman helped her obtain what she needed to alter her clothes. She reshaped the doublet to fit her, cut linen breeches from her shift, and cut her hair; dressed as a sailor, she no longer presented herself as the wife Bernabo had ordered killed. At the shore she encountered a Catalan gentleman, Senor Encararch, whose ship lay offshore. She entered his service under the name Sicurano da Finale and embarked with him.

The new identity was not only a disguise for travel. In Senor Encararch’s service, Sicurano proved so capable that the gentleman came to favor him and provided him with better clothing. When the ship made a voyage to Alexandria, Senor Encararch presented peregrine falcons to the Soldan. The Soldan noticed Sicurano’s conduct and manners, repeatedly entertained Senor Encararch, and eventually asked that Sicurano be given to him as a servant. Senor Encararch agreed reluctantly. Sicurano then won the Soldan’s favor as well, through the same good behavior that had first secured his place aboard ship.

A false death returns as evidence

When the Soldan prepared for the annual fair at Acre, where Christian and Saracen merchants gathered, he sent officers and troops to protect the merchants and their goods. By then Sicurano knew the language of the country well enough to serve as governor and captain of the guard. The position carried Ginevra back into contact with Italian merchants and objects that recalled her former life. At one Venetian merchants’ stall, she recognized a purse and girdle that had belonged to her. She concealed her reaction and asked casually who owned them and whether they were for sale.

Ambrogiuolo came forward, laughing, and claimed the objects, offering them to Sicurano. When asked how he had acquired them, he said that Ginevra had given them to him after he had lain with her. He also recounted the wager and Bernabo’s response, boasting that Bernabo had been foolish enough to punish his wife rather than himself. Ambrogiuolo believed Ginevra was dead; his account therefore exposed the truth without revealing that the person listening was the woman he had betrayed.

Sicurano understood from this confession that Ambrogiuolo’s deception had caused Bernabo’s anger and Ginevra’s near-murder. She recognized him as the source of her misfortunes and resolved that he should not go unpunished. The episode’s reversal rests on the distance between appearance and knowledge: the husband accepted a bodily detail as proof of adultery, the servant mistook a change of clothes and a false report for a death, and Ambrogiuolo confessed to the supposed victim while taking her for someone else. Ginevra’s survival and adopted identity place her in a position to hear the fraud described in the perpetrator’s own words.