Pietro da Tresanti

Pietro da Tresanti, known among his friends as Gossip Pietro, is a poor trader whose desire to make the most of a supposed magical transformation ruins the very scheme he hopes will benefit him. In Dioneo’s comic tale, Pietro’s unquestioning belief in Dom Gianni’s claim that he can turn a woman into a mare leads him to invite the priest to perform the conjuration on his own wife, Gemmata. At the crucial moment, Pietro speaks up to stop the transformation—and thereby stops the sexual deception that the supposed magic conceals.

Identity and Circumstances

Pietro is introduced as a fellow trader and close friend of Dom Gianni di Barolo, a priest in Barletta who supplements the meagre income from his parish by buying and selling goods at fairs in Apulia. Pietro pursues the same trade, travelling with an ass. His friendship with the priest is expressed through reciprocal hospitality: when Pietro visits Barletta, Dom Gianni lodges and entertains him; when the priest comes to Tresanti, Pietro welcomes him in return.

Pietro’s home is too poor to offer his guest a proper bed. He has only a small, inadequate house and one bed, which he shares with his young wife. The priest therefore sleeps beside his mare on a bundle of straw in the stable, where Pietro’s ass is kept. Gemmata feels uncomfortable that their guest should be lodged this way. More than once, she offers to sleep at a neighbour’s house, Zita Caraprese’s, so that Dom Gianni can share the bed with Pietro. The priest refuses. His explanation is not that he needs no better lodging, but that he has a way to make his mare into a handsome woman and lie with her, then change her back again.

Friendship, Hospitality, and the Promise of Magic

Gemmata believes Dom Gianni’s story and takes it to Pietro as practical advice. If the priest is as good a friend as Pietro says, she reasons, he should teach Pietro the charm. Pietro might then turn her into a mare and use the animal to work alongside his own ass; once they returned home, he could make her a woman again. The fantasy treats an extraordinary transformation as a useful household arrangement, and Pietro accepts it without questioning whether the priest’s claim is true.

Pietro presses Dom Gianni to teach him. The priest initially tries to dissuade him, but, finding that he cannot shake Pietro’s insistence, agrees to demonstrate the spell the next morning. He warns that attaching the tail is the most difficult part. The warning gives Pietro a vivid expectation of what is to come, while also setting up the single condition that will govern the scene: Pietro must do exactly as instructed and say nothing, whatever he hears or sees.

Before daybreak, Pietro and Gemmata, who have barely slept for anticipation, rise and call the priest. Dom Gianni enters their little room in his shirt. He gives Pietro a light to hold and tells him to watch closely, remember the procedure, and remain silent. Gemmata is stripped and made to stand on all fours. The priest names the parts of a mare as he touches her head, hair, arms, chest, back, belly, and legs, presenting his actions as stages in the transformation.

The Interrupted Conjuration

The ritual changes character as it approaches its supposed completion. When Dom Gianni reaches the final step, he raises his shirt and uses a dibble to perform the act he describes as putting on the tail. Pietro has watched closely, as instructed, but now objects that he will not have a tail put there. His interruption breaks the priest’s performance. Dom Gianni withdraws and reproaches Pietro for speaking: the mare, he claims, had been completely made, but Pietro’s words have spoiled the spell beyond repair.

Pietro’s objection exposes the gap between the magical explanation and the bodily action taking place in front of him. He may have accepted the tale of transformation, but he recognizes that this last act is wrong and refuses to let it proceed. His protest is therefore both the comic failure of the supposed charm and the point at which he asserts a limit. Dom Gianni answers that Pietro should have trusted him to place the tail, while Pietro counters that the priest had not even explained that Pietro would have to do it himself—and had positioned it too low. The exchange lets the deception collapse into blunt practical disagreement.

Gemmata, who has stood silently through the supposed ritual, then dresses and rebukes her husband for spoiling the affair. She had wanted him to succeed in the arrangement she proposed, and sees the absence of a tail as proof that he has undone it. Her response turns the scene’s misunderstanding into a final reversal: Pietro stops the act because he thinks the transformation is being done improperly, while Gemmata regards his intervention as the cause of their loss.

Ending and Narrative Function

Once Pietro has spoken, Dom Gianni declares that there is no way to perform the transformation again. Gemmata dresses, disappointed, and the household returns to ordinary life. Pietro goes with the priest to the fair at Bitonto and continues his accustomed trade with his ass; he never again asks Dom Gianni for such a service. The ending gives no sign that Pietro has learned how to distinguish the priest’s claims from his practical intentions, only that he does not repeat this particular request.

Dioneo introduces the tale as a warning about how one small failure to observe the conditions of enchantment can ruin a magician’s work. The scene’s comedy depends on Pietro taking those conditions literally: he watches the procedure, holds the light, and remains silent until he sees what he cannot accept. His final words end the performance, but they cannot undo his credulity or the awkwardness of the episode. As a character, Pietro is defined by the mixture of trust, material calculation, and belated resistance that carries him from an impoverished guest-room problem to the failed mare-conjuration.