Peronella

Peronella is a poor young wife in Naples whose quick improvisation protects her lover when her husband unexpectedly returns home. In the episode known as Peronella’s lover-in-the-vat deception, she turns a household object into a hiding place, recasts an apparent crisis as a profitable sale, and gets the husband himself to help finish the concealment. Her resourcefulness gives the story its comic reversal: the man who believes he is protecting an honest wife becomes an unwitting participant in her affair.

Identity and Circumstances

Peronella is described as fair and lovely, but the details that shape her situation are practical ones. She and her husband live on scant earnings: he works as a mason, while she spins. Their income is small, and the vat has long been an obstruction in their house. The story establishes her not as a lady with servants or independent wealth, but as a working woman negotiating both material hardship and the close confines of a shared home.

A young gallant from the neighborhood falls in love with her and persists until they become intimate. The arrangement depends on the husband’s routine: he leaves early to seek or perform work, and the lover comes to the house after watching him go. Their meetings have succeeded repeatedly, but the arrangement rests on a fragile assumption—that the husband will remain away all day. Peronella’s domestic space is therefore both the setting of her relationship and the place where it can be exposed.

The Unexpected Return

One morning the husband comes back while Peronella and Giannello Strignario are together. He has gone out carrying his tools, but the door is locked from within. Rather than suspecting an affair, he interprets that small sign as proof of his wife’s virtue: he thinks she has secured the door to keep anyone from bothering her. His confidence supplies Peronella with an opening, but it also sharpens the danger. She recognizes his knock and immediately understands that the usual plan has failed.

She sends Giannello into the vat while she goes to let her husband in. Then she meets the return with a performance of anger and complaint. She scolds him for coming home early, invokes the strain of spinning to keep their lamp supplied with oil, and presents herself as a neglected, hardworking wife. Her lament is pointedly theatrical: she complains that other women enjoy themselves with lovers, while she has supposedly refused such opportunities out of honesty. The speech diverts attention from the man hidden inside the house and makes the husband answer her grievance rather than investigate the locked door.

The Vat and the Reversal

The husband explains that there is no work because it is a feast day, and says he has arranged to sell the troublesome vat for five florins. Peronella immediately claims to have sold it already, for seven, to the man who has come to inspect it. The invented transaction makes the hidden lover appear to have a legitimate reason to be in the house and gives the husband a financial incentive to accept her account. He dismisses his own prospective buyer and agrees to settle the matter with hers.

Peronella calls Giannello out of the vat, where he has been listening for signs of danger. He acts as though he has just arrived to inspect the goods. To explain why he has not yet accepted the vat, he complains that its inside is caked with hard residue and insists that it must be cleaned. The husband, eager to complete the sale, takes up his tools, removes his coat, and climbs inside with a light and scraper. Peronella leans into the narrow opening and directs him to the spots he has missed. That ordinary act of giving instructions keeps her husband occupied while Giannello takes advantage of the position she has created; the narration makes clear that the pair resume their intimacy as the vat is scraped.

Once the cleaning is done, Peronella asks the buyer to inspect the vat. Giannello declares it satisfactory and pays the husband the seven florins. The vat is carried away to his house. The deception thus achieves more than concealment: the husband performs the labor that makes the sale plausible, and the lover leaves with the object that has hidden him. A domestic inconvenience becomes the instrument and apparent subject of the bargain that saves Peronella from discovery.

Wit, Gender, and the Story’s Design

Filostrato introduces the tale as a short account of how a woman can cheat a husband, presenting such stories as useful because they warn men that women can be just as alert to deception. That frame makes Peronella’s success more than a private trick. The story invites its listeners to enjoy the difference between the husband’s trusting interpretation of events and the audience’s knowledge of what is actually happening. His assumption that the locked door signifies honesty, followed by his willingness to accept the more lucrative sale, repeatedly turns his confidence and self-interest against him.

Peronella’s choices are sharply bounded by the circumstances the story gives her: little money, work at home, and a husband whose unexpected return threatens to expose the affair. Yet within that constraint she controls the explanation of the morning, invents the sale, and directs both men’s actions. The vat is not merely a hiding place; as an object that obstructs the household and is then sold, it links the material poverty of the couple to the comic machinery of the plot. The final payment closes the deception with a visible, practical result. Peronella retains her secret, her husband believes he has concluded a good bargain, and the lover departs with the vat.