Peronella’s lover-in-the-vat deception

Peronella’s lover-in-the-vat deception is a comic tale of sudden danger converted into opportunity. When Peronella’s husband returns unexpectedly and finds her with Giannello Strignario, she hides her lover in a vat and improvises a sale that keeps her husband busy cleaning it. The vat is at once hiding place, household burden, and disputed property; Peronella’s quick use of all three roles carries the trick to its conclusion.

Setting and circumstances

The story takes place in Naples, where Peronella and her husband live on the scant earnings of his work as a mason and her spinning. Their means are limited, and the vat has long been an obstruction in their small household. Giannello, a young man from the neighborhood, has become Peronella’s lover after seeing and pursuing her. They have arranged their meetings around the husband’s usual early departure for work: Giannello watches him leave, then goes to Peronella’s house on the solitary street called Avorio.

That routine has worked repeatedly, but one morning it fails. The husband returns after Peronella has let Giannello into the house, and the locked door gives her only a brief interval to act. The tale’s domestic setting makes the danger immediate: there is no separate refuge, and the large vat already standing in the house is the one place in which the lover can be concealed.

The unexpected return

Peronella recognizes her husband by his knock and warns Giannello that she is in danger. She sends him into the vat, then opens the door with an angry manner and reproaches her husband for coming back so early, suggesting that he has neglected his work. Her performance answers the immediate threat with a second, more elaborate deception: instead of appearing alarmed, she presents herself as an industrious wife exasperated by an idle husband.

The husband explains that he has not abandoned work. It is the Feast-day of San Galeone, when no work is being done, and he has returned with a prospective buyer. He says he has arranged to sell the troublesome vat for five florins, enough, he claims, to provide bread for more than a month. This ordinary explanation sharpens the reversal: the husband believes he has returned with a useful solution to their poverty, unaware that his wife’s concealed lover is inside the very object he means to sell.

The invented sale

Peronella immediately claims that she has already sold the vat for seven florins to an honest man who came to inspect it. Her husband is satisfied rather than suspicious, and dismisses his own buyer. The story thus turns his return into an apparent household disagreement over price, not a discovery of adultery. Her claim also gives Giannello a reason to emerge: he can present himself as the purchaser without seeming to have been caught hiding there.

Giannello says that the vat appears sound but that its interior is crusted with dry residue, which he cannot remove with his nails. He will not take it until it is clean. Peronella accepts the objection and tells her husband to do the cleaning. The husband lays down his tools, removes his coat, calls for a light and a scraper, and climbs inside. The intended buyer has become the cleaner, while the wife who claims to have made the bargain directs the work.

Peronella puts her head and one arm, shoulder and all, through the vat’s narrow opening and points out the places her husband must scrape. This posture lets her supervise him and keep the mouth of the vat occupied. While the husband works inside, Giannello takes the opportunity to satisfy his desire with Peronella. The story makes the deception physical as well as verbal: the vat’s cramped opening determines where each person can be and what each can see, while the husband’s labor conceals the encounter taking place just beyond his reach.

The trick completed

When the husband comes out, Peronella tells Giannello to inspect the vat by the light and decide whether it is clean. Giannello approves it, pays the promised seven florins, and has it carried to his own house. The sale is completed on the terms Peronella invented, and the husband’s effort has helped prepare the object for the buyer without exposing the lover who had been concealed inside it.

The episode’s central irony is that the husband contributes to the success of the deception at every turn. His early return supplies the crisis, but his explanation of the feast day and the sale gives Peronella an opportunity to redirect suspicion. He believes her complaint about his idleness, abandons his own buyer when she claims a better price, and cleans the vat because the purchaser demands it. The final payment makes the lie materially convincing: the household receives seven florins, and the lover leaves with the vat that had hidden him.

Narrative role and significance

Filostrato introduces the tale within a discussion of husbands’ tricks and women’s capacity to deceive in return. That framing presents Peronella’s improvisation not merely as an isolated escape but as an example of the alertness women may use when faced with men who presume themselves more knowing. The episode’s comedy depends on the gap between the husband’s confidence in his wife and the actual purpose served by each of her words and gestures.

The broader premise of the work gives this reversal a social edge. Its opening account describes women in love as constrained by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, often confined to their chambers with fewer diversions than men. Peronella’s story does not dissolve such constraints: she is poor, works by spinning, and must hide her lover inside a household possession while her husband is present. Instead, it dramatizes a narrow but consequential form of agency, achieved through timing, performance, and command of the domestic space. The vat’s transformation from cumbersome object to hiding place, then to saleable commodity, gives the tale its compact structure and its final comic reversal.