Naples

Naples is presented in the Decameron as a city where commerce, danger, and social life meet in close quarters. Andreuccio di Pietro arrives to buy horses and, in a single night, is robbed, endangered, and nearly trapped in a tomb before escaping with a valuable ring. In another Neapolitan story, Ricciardo Minutolo turns Catella’s jealousy into the instrument of a deception. The city is not merely a backdrop: its market, streets, church, and customary outings along the shore shape the opportunities and reversals of both tales.

Setting and Urban Character

The narrative calls Naples a very ancient city, delightful and exceptionally abundant in its provisions. That description accompanies the story of Ricciardo Minutolo and Catella, whose social world includes gatherings of ladies and gentlemen beyond the city itself, on the sea’s banks. Naples thus appears not only as a place of private intrigue but as a center whose inhabitants’ customs extend into shared leisure beyond its streets.

The city’s settings are sharply contrasted. Its horse market draws merchants and buyers; the street called Malpertugio leads Andreuccio into a house whose apparent welcome conceals a robbery; and the cathedral becomes the target of a nocturnal theft. These places are linked by Andreuccio’s movement through the city, as his initial business venture is diverted into a sequence of increasingly hazardous encounters.

Andreuccio’s Night in the City

Andreuccio, a young horse dealer from Perugia, reaches Naples on a Sunday evening with five hundred gold florins, intending to purchase horses. At the market the next morning, he examines several animals without reaching agreement. To show that he is ready to buy, he repeatedly displays his purse in front of those coming and going. That open display makes his money visible to a Sicilian woman, who resolves to get it from him.

The woman learns his name and family background and arranges for a maid to approach him later. The invitation to meet a gentlewoman flatters Andreuccio’s vanity: he assumes that the woman must have fallen in love with him. He follows the maid to Malpertugio, enters without suspicion, and is greeted with embraces and apparent tenderness. The welcome proves to be part of the scheme. While Andreuccio is in the house, he falls into a privy and loses his money; the household then shuts him out. His first misfortune is therefore both physical and financial, and it leaves him stranded in an unfamiliar city without his purse.

In the street, Andreuccio meets two men who recognize the house as one associated with danger. They tell him that, had he remained inside and fallen asleep, he might have been killed as well as robbed. Rather than recover his money, he accepts their proposal to join a robbery: that day Archbishop Filippo Minutolo has been buried in rich vestments, wearing a ruby worth more than five hundred florins. The scheme exposes Andreuccio to another reversal. His new companions lower him by rope into a well to wash away the stench, but flee when the watch arrives. The watchmen, mistaking the rope for a bucket, begin hauling him up; when Andreuccio grabs the rim, they are frightened and run, leaving him free.

The robbers later enter the cathedral and open the archbishop’s tomb. When a second group arrives to plunder it, Andreuccio is still inside. He frightens off the newcomers by seizing the priest who tries to climb in, and escapes through the open tomb. Near daybreak he makes his way to the shore and back to his inn. Following his host’s advice, he leaves Naples at once and returns to Perugia with the ruby on his finger. The planned horse purchase has become a night of successive losses and escapes; his final gain is a ring rather than the horses he came to buy.

The Shore, Society, and Ricciardo’s Deception

Naples also provides a social setting for Ricciardo Minutolo’s pursuit of Catella. Ricciardo is wealthy and noble-born, and although he has a beautiful wife, he falls in love with Catella, whom general opinion regards as the most beautiful woman in Naples. Catella, however, loves her husband, Filippello Fighinolfi, and is intensely jealous of him. Ricciardo’s ordinary efforts to win her affection fail.

After his relatives urge him to abandon the hopeless passion, Ricciardo takes advantage of what they tell him about Catella’s jealousy. He pretends to have transferred his affections to another woman and publicly performs the familiar gestures of courtship, including jousting and tournamenting. The feint persuades the Neapolitans, and eventually Catella herself, that he no longer desires her. As a result, she begins to treat him with the unguarded familiarity of a neighbor.

A customary outing along the sea gives Ricciardo a chance to turn that familiarity into a trap. Companies of ladies and gentlemen go to the shore to dine and sup; Ricciardo joins Catella’s party after affecting reluctance. When she is briefly left near him, he hints that Filippello is having an affair. Catella’s jealousy makes her eager to learn more. Ricciardo uses her demand for proof to draw her into a plan involving a bathhouse and a false claim that Filippello will be there with his own wife. The episode’s reversal is built from the contrast between Catella’s devotion to her husband and the suspicion that Ricciardo deliberately awakens: she believes she is pursuing evidence about Filippello, but the deception brings her into a bed with Ricciardo.

Homeland and Intended Refuge

Naples also matters in the account of Madam Beritola Caracciola. She and her husband, Arrighetto Capece, are described as noble Neapolitans. After the political upheaval in Sicily and Arrighetto’s capture, Madam Beritola flees with her young son, Giusfredi, and later gives birth to Scacciato. She intends to return to her kinsfolk in Naples, but the ship carrying her is driven instead to Ponza. The interruption makes Naples a destination she cannot reach, a point of family connection and hoped-for refuge rather than the site of the events that follow.

Across these stories, Naples accommodates sharply different forms of exposure. Andreuccio’s conspicuous purse makes him vulnerable in public and his credulity carries him from the market into criminal danger; Catella’s entry into Ricciardo’s plot is produced through social familiarity and jealousy. The city’s narrative significance lies in this range: it is at once a commercial destination, a network of streets and institutions through which danger unfolds, a setting for communal leisure, and a home toward which a displaced character longs to return.