Pietro da Tresanti—Gemmata

Pietro da Tresanti and Gemmata are joined in a comic episode of hospitality, credulity, and thwarted desire. When Dom Gianni offers to make Gemmata into a mare, Pietro and his wife accept the claim and ask him to teach the transformation; Pietro’s inability to keep silent at the crucial moment breaks the apparent spell. Their relation is defined less by lasting change than by the brief, shared hope of escaping their straitened circumstances—and by the comic blame Gemmata lays on her husband when that hope collapses.

A household constrained by poverty

Pietro and Gemmata live together in a poor little house at Tresanti, where their limited means shape even the terms on which they can receive a guest. Pietro has contracted a close friendship with Dom Gianni, a priest from Barletta who supplements his scant income by hawking and trading goods at fairs in Apulia. When Dom Gianni visits Pietro, he is welcomed and entertained in return for the hospitality he provides at his own parsonage.

The couple have only one sorry bed, which they share, so Dom Gianni must sleep on a truss of straw beside his mare, stabled with Pietro’s ass. Gemmata recognizes the discomfort of this arrangement and more than once offers to sleep at a neighbor’s, Zita Caraprese, so that Dom Gianni can share the bed with Pietro. Her suggestion reflects the practical intimacy of their household: hospitality is a reciprocal obligation, but the couple have little space or comfort to offer.

The promise of transformation

Dom Gianni refuses Gemmata’s offer to sleep elsewhere. Instead, he tells her that he can turn his mare into a beautiful woman and lie with her, then change her back whenever he wishes. Gemmata believes him and reports the claim to Pietro. She urges her husband to learn the charm so that he, too, can turn her into a mare and use the couple’s ass and mare for their affairs; in her calculation, the household would gain two animals for the price of one.

Pietro is dull of wit, and Gemmata’s proposal persuades him. He repeatedly presses Dom Gianni to teach him the trick, although the priest tries to cure him of the idea. At last Dom Gianni agrees to demonstrate it the following morning, before daybreak. The arrangement converts the couple’s economic constraint into the premise of a sexual and magical fantasy: Gemmata sees an opportunity to enlarge their household’s useful stock, while Pietro accepts the promise of supernatural transformation as a practical lesson.

The interrupted rite

Before dawn, Pietro and Gemmata, having scarcely slept from impatience, call Dom Gianni. He enters Pietro’s small chamber in his shirt and warns them that the procedure will fail if Pietro speaks, whatever he sees or hears. Pietro promises to obey and holds the light so that he can watch. Dom Gianni strips Gemmata and has her stand on all fours, then touches her in turn while naming the parts of a mare: head, mane, legs and feet, chest, back, belly, crupper, thighs, and legs.

The performance reaches its decisive moment when only the tail remains. Dom Gianni uses a dibble, the pointed tool associated with planting, in the action that is meant to complete the transformation. Pietro, watching closely, objects that he will not have a tail put there. His protest breaks the silence Dom Gianni had made a condition of success. The priest immediately declares the mare made but the charm ruined, with no way to begin again; the scene makes Pietro’s speech, rather than any shortage of effort or elaborate magical counterspell, the direct cause of the failure.

Blame, consequence, and comic reversal

Gemmata gets up and rebukes Pietro for spoiling the scheme, pointing out that a mare without a tail would be no mare at all. Her response briefly reverses the earlier arrangement: she had encouraged Pietro to pursue the transformation, but after his interruption she identifies him as the person who has deprived them both of its imagined benefit. Pietro’s foolishness is thus exposed within the marriage through the difference between her practical calculation and his credulous, badly timed intervention.

The failure changes nothing in their material lives. Gemmata dresses, disconsolate, and Pietro continues his old trade with an ass. He and Dom Gianni travel together to the fair at Bitonto, and Pietro never again asks the priest to perform the service. Their friendship and the pattern of mutual hospitality survive the failed lesson, but the promised transformation does not: the couple return to the same household, with the same animals and the same economic limits. The episode makes their marriage the setting for a compact comic reversal in which Gemmata devises the bargain, Pietro ruins it by speaking, and the ordinary routine resumes.