Pinuccio and Adriano’s Night of Mistaken Beds

Pinuccio and Adriano’s Night of Mistaken Beds turns a crowded inn chamber into a comic machinery of mistaken identities, misplaced bodies, and improvised denial. During a single dark night, Pinuccio secretly joins Niccolosa, Adriano inadvertently moves the cradle that marks the innkeeper’s wife’s bed, and the wife herself mistakes Adriano for her husband. When Pinuccio later boasts to the innkeeper, believing him to be Adriano, the household’s accidental entanglements nearly become a scandal. Quick collaboration converts the evidence into a tale of drunken sleepwalking and dreams, and the visitors ride away unexposed.

The Cramped Chamber and Its Occupants

Pinuccio and Adriano arrive at an inn where the host offers them shelter because they have been caught out on the road with no time to go elsewhere. The host has only one small bedchamber. Three pallet beds are arranged inside it: two at one end and a third opposite, with scarcely enough room to move between them. The friends share the least uncomfortable bed. The host and his wife occupy another, while their daughter Niccolosa is placed in the remaining bed. The little boy’s cradle stands beside his mother’s bed.

The room’s tight arrangement is not incidental scenery: it sets the terms of the episode. In darkness, there is no easy passage from one bed to another, and the cradle becomes a misleading marker of where the household members are sleeping. Pinuccio and Adriano are both awake, though they pretend to sleep, and Pinuccio has already observed the layout. Once the others seem asleep, he rises and goes to Niccolosa. She receives him joyfully, though timidly, and the two take the pleasure they both desire.

A Cradle Changes Places

While Pinuccio is with Niccolosa, a cat knocks something over. The innkeeper’s wife wakes at the sound, fears it may signal something more serious, and goes to investigate in the dark. Meanwhile, Adriano rises for a natural necessity. Unable to pass the cradle where it stands, he lifts it and sets it beside his own bed; after attending to his need, he returns to bed without thinking about the change.

The wife finds that the fallen object is harmless. She does not light a candle, but returns through the darkness, reaches the place where she expects the cradle to be, and finds it gone. She supposes she has nearly walked directly to a guest’s bed. Moving farther into the chamber, she finds the cradle beside Adriano and lies down next to him, believing she has reached her husband. Adriano is awake, recognizes the opportunity, and welcomes her; she is content with the encounter, still taking him for her husband.

The scene’s comedy comes from the gap between what bodies are doing and what the people believe about them. The wife’s mistaken route begins with a mundane disturbance and an innocent relocation of the cradle; neither Adriano nor the wife set out to create the confusion. Yet the moved object silently rearranges the room’s apparent identities, while the absence of light keeps the mistake intact.

Pinuccio’s Return and the Near-Exposure

After satisfying himself with Niccolosa, Pinuccio rises to return to his bed. The cradle blocks his way, so he takes another bed for Adriano’s. He goes farther than intended and lies down beside the host, who wakes. Still believing he is speaking to his friend, Pinuccio boasts about his night with Niccolosa and how many times he has gone to her. The host understands enough to be angered and threatens to punish him for the outrage.

The wife, meanwhile, thinks she is still beside her husband. Hearing the host and Pinuccio argue, she assumes the men are quarreling over something else. Adriano, still in bed with her, laughs and attributes their words to the men having drunk too much the previous night. His explanation gives her the clue she needs: she realizes that the man beside her is Adriano, not her husband. She does not confront him or confess. Instead, she gets up silently, carries the cradle through the dark to the side of Niccolosa’s bed, and lies down beside her daughter.

From there she calls to the host as though awakened by the commotion and asks what has happened. When he reports Pinuccio’s claim about Niccolosa, she denies it: she says she has been beside her daughter all night and could not have slept, and insists that Pinuccio is lying. Her account covers her daughter and herself at once. Adriano reinforces it, presenting Pinuccio as a habitual sleepwalker who mistakes dreams for reality. The host, hearing both accounts, begins to believe that Pinuccio is dreaming.

A Convenient Dream and Its Aftermath

The host shakes Pinuccio and orders him back to his own bed. Pinuccio understands the situation but sustains the fiction, wandering into further nonsense as though still asleep. His performance turns the accusation into a spectacle that the host can laugh at rather than pursue. At last Pinuccio pretends to wake, asks whether it is already day, and returns to bed beside Adriano. The men rise in the morning; the host mocks Pinuccio’s supposed dreams, and the party trades jokes before the visitors saddle their horses and ride toward Florence.

The ending closes the immediate danger without erasing what happened. Pinuccio and Adriano are pleased both by the night’s outcome and by the way the crisis has been managed. Pinuccio later finds another means of meeting Niccolosa, who assures her mother that he must indeed have been dreaming. The mother, remembering Adriano’s embraces, privately knows that she alone had been awake. Thus the household’s public explanation and the wife’s private knowledge remain distinct: the story ends not with discovery or punishment, but with an agreed fiction that protects the lovers and preserves the comic secret.