Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica and Bartolomea's Marriage

The marriage of Ricciardo di Chinzica and Bartolomea turns a socially advantageous match into a comic contest over what marriage is meant to provide. Ricciardo, a rich judge who trusts schedules and legal reasoning, marries a beautiful young woman but fails to reckon with the difference between his own habits and her desires. After a corsair carries Bartolomea away, she refuses to return to her husband; the marriage ends not in reconciliation but in Ricciardo’s lonely death and her subsequent marriage to Paganino da Mare.

A match shaped by wealth and misjudgment

Ricciardo is introduced as a Pisan judge more gifted in intellect than in bodily strength. Rich and eager to marry a beautiful young woman, he is given Bartolomea, the daughter of Messer Lotto Gualandi, in a splendid wedding. The match brings together his wealth and her youth and beauty, but the story immediately signals that these qualities do not ensure a compatible marriage. On their wedding night, Ricciardo manages the consummation only with great difficulty; the following morning, exhausted and depleted, he has to revive himself with malmsey, restorative confections, and other remedies.

The problem is not simply that Ricciardo is old or physically frail. He applies the habits of a legal scholar to intimate life, treating his own limits as though they could be made into rules for both spouses. He invents a calendar of prohibitions, claiming that saints’ days, fasts, Ember Days, vigils, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Lent, lunar phases, and other observances require abstinence. The list turns the shared bed into a timetable of exceptions. Bartolomea, whom he approaches perhaps once a month, bears the consequences of a system designed around his convenience.

His control extends beyond the calendar. Ricciardo keeps watch over Bartolomea lest someone teach her to distinguish his supposed holy days from ordinary working days. That vigilance reveals the marriage’s underlying imbalance: rather than respond to her frustration, he tries to prevent her from acquiring either knowledge or alternatives. His legal learning, the quality that defines his public role, becomes a comic instrument of private evasion.

The fishing trip and the loss of the marriage

During hot weather, Ricciardo takes Bartolomea to a country house near Monte Nero. To entertain her, he arranges a fishing excursion, with himself in one boat and Bartolomea among the women in another. The boats drift several miles out to sea. Paganino da Mare, a famous corsair, spots the party, overtakes the women’s boat, and carries Bartolomea away in full sight of Ricciardo, who has reached shore. Ricciardo’s jealousy and complaints cannot undo the abduction; he does not even know who has taken her or where she has gone.

Paganino, who has no wife, decides to keep Bartolomea because he finds her beautiful. At first she weeps, but he tries to comfort her, and the story sharply contrasts this attention with her life in Pisa. As they travel to Monaco, Ricciardo’s carefully maintained calendar of holy days and abstentions has no place in Paganino’s household. Bartolomea begins to live contentedly with him, and Paganino treats her honorably as his wife. The narrative’s reversal is pointed: the man who took her by force becomes the partner with whom she says she is willing to remain, while her lawful husband arrives expecting that his status alone will restore their former household.

Ricciardo’s attempt to reclaim her

When Ricciardo learns where Bartolomea is, he sails to Monaco prepared to spend whatever is necessary for her ransom. Paganino does not immediately acknowledge him as her husband. Instead, he offers to bring Bartolomea before him and allows her to decide whether she recognizes Ricciardo and wants to leave. The arrangement exposes the gap between Ricciardo’s expectation and Bartolomea’s choice: he assumes she will greet him joyfully, while she first receives him as though he were a stranger.

Ricciardo interprets her apparent refusal as fear of speaking before Paganino and asks to speak with her alone. Once they are together, Bartolomea confirms that she knows who he is. Her refusal is deliberate, not mistaken identity or an inability to remember him. She tells him that during their marriage he failed to understand her youth and vigor, and she contrasts his many religious exceptions with Paganino’s unbroken attention. She also turns Ricciardo’s own habits into an image of wasted cultivation: he knew the saints’ days so well that he seemed more a crier of observances than a husband.

Ricciardo then appeals to her family’s honor, her reputation, and the danger that Paganino might eventually dismiss her. He promises to make a greater effort if she will return. Bartolomea rejects the offer on its own terms. She argues that those who arranged her first marriage did not protect her interests, so she need not sacrifice herself to preserve their honor now. Nor does she accept Ricciardo’s belated pledge as a meaningful remedy. She says she will remain with Paganino and warns that she will call for help if Ricciardo tries to force her to go. Her decision makes the failed marriage more than a contest between two men: Bartolomea states which household she chooses and refuses to let her husband’s claim settle the matter.

Ending and significance

Ricciardo leaves Monaco distressed and returns to Pisa without Bartolomea. There he falls into such a state of grief that, when people greet him or ask him something, he answers with the same bitter saying: the ill hole will have no holidays. The refrain reduces his elaborate calendar to a final, bleak joke. Not long afterward, he dies. His end follows from the story’s central irony: a man who repeatedly postponed married intimacy by invoking time and observance is finally left with no time in which to repair the relationship.

Paganino, learning of Ricciardo’s death and of Bartolomea’s affection for him, marries her lawfully. The couple live cheerfully together, without observing the saints’ days, vigils, or Lent as barriers to their intimacy. This ending does not restore the original marriage; it replaces it with a union founded, in the tale’s comic logic, on a form of companionship Bartolomea says she had lacked. The contrast between Ricciardo’s many rules and Paganino’s constant presence gives the story its forceful account of marital incompatibility, while Bartolomea’s refusal to return makes her preference—not her first husband’s wealth, title, or claim—the decisive fact in the resolution.