Pisa is the home city and point of return in the tale of Ricciardo di Chinzica and Bartolomea, where a learned judge’s elaborate restrictions on marriage are overturned by the sea-born separation of the couple. The city anchors the tale’s contrast between a life governed by calendars and legal reasoning and a life Bartolomea considers more satisfying; after failing to bring her back, Ricciardo returns to Pisa and dies there.

Pisa as the Tale’s Setting

The story introduces Pisa through Ricciardo, a judge who is described as richer in intelligence than in physical strength. He seeks a beautiful young wife, and Lotto Gualandi gives him his daughter Bartolomea, praised as one of Pisa’s fairest and handsomest women. The narrator adds a joking comparison: few women in the city are not striking to look at. This brief local portrait supplies the tale’s principal information about Pisa itself. The city is not developed through a survey of its streets or institutions; instead, it is established as the couple’s home and as the place to which Ricciardo returns after their separation.

The account presents Ricciardo’s judicial learning as a defining feature of his character, but it does not describe the organization of Pisa’s courts or the city’s laws. His professional habits matter chiefly within the household: the judge who is accustomed to study and civil-law argument applies the same ordering impulse to married life. Pisa thus serves as the social point of origin for the domestic arrangement that the tale will expose as untenable.

Marriage Ordered by a Calendar

After an elaborate wedding, Ricciardo manages the first night of the marriage only with difficulty. The next day, weak and exhausted, he restores himself with malmsey, restorative confections, and other remedies. Having learned something about his own limitations, he turns to a calendar as a means of limiting marital relations. He tells Bartolomea that every day is sacred to one or more saints and that husband and wife should abstain in their honor. He adds fast days, Ember Days, apostolic vigils, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Lent, lunar phases, and numerous further exceptions.

The supposed calendar converts his private reluctance into a rule that appears to govern the whole year. Bartolomea is left with marital relations perhaps once a month, and Ricciardo keeps strict watch lest someone teach her which days might be suitable for intimacy. The tale makes Pisa the background to this carefully managed household, but its central tension is not a conflict between civic authorities: it is the distance between Ricciardo’s learned justifications and Bartolomea’s experience of the marriage. His arrangement gives abstinence the appearance of religious and scholarly necessity while denying her a say in their shared life.

The Coastal Abduction and Separation

During hot weather, Ricciardo takes Bartolomea to a country house near Monte Nero for a stay in the country. To provide diversion, he arranges a fishing outing at sea. The party goes out in two boats, Ricciardo with the fishermen and Bartolomea with other women. As the boats drift several miles from shore, a galliot belonging to the famous corsair Paganino da Mare catches sight of them and overtakes the boat carrying the women.

Paganino sees Bartolomea, takes her aboard, and sails away in full view of Ricciardo, who has reached land. The abduction abruptly breaks the household regime that Ricciardo had imposed: he is left without knowing who has taken his wife or where she has been carried. He complains of the corsairs both in Pisa and elsewhere, but his complaints cannot identify the captor or undo the separation. Paganino, meanwhile, decides to keep Bartolomea for himself. He comforts her with words and later with physical attentions; by the time they reach Monaco, she has put Ricciardo’s calendar and its restrictions out of mind. Paganino treats her honorably as his wife, and she begins a cheerful life with him.

Return to Pisa and the Tale’s Reversal

When Ricciardo eventually learns where Bartolomea is, he travels by sea to Monaco, intending to spend whatever money is needed to ransom her. He approaches Paganino politely and asks him to return the woman he calls his wife. Paganino feigns not to recognize either Ricciardo or Bartolomea as his, and the negotiation does not restore the marriage. Bartolomea tells Ricciardo plainly that she does not wish to return. She contrasts the rare, calendar-governed intimacy of her life in Pisa with Paganino’s attentions and refuses to let Ricciardo claim greater concern for her honor after the fact than he showed during their marriage.

Ricciardo leaves Monaco sorrowful and returns to Pisa without Bartolomea. His defeat is registered in the phrase he repeats to people who greet him or ask him a question: the ill hole will have no holidays. The saying turns his former calendar of abstentions into a bitter reminder of what he has lost. Not long afterward, he dies of chagrin. Paganino, knowing Bartolomea’s affection for him, marries her lawfully; their life together observes none of Ricciardo’s prescribed saints’ days, vigils, or Lenten abstinences.

Narrative Significance

Pisa’s narrative importance lies in the return that fails to repair the marriage. Ricciardo begins as a judge who tries to make intimate life conform to a schedule of exceptions; after the sea separates him from Bartolomea, neither money nor polite negotiation can restore his authority over her choices. The city receives him back, but not the household he had attempted to regulate. Bartolomea’s departure and refusal therefore make Pisa the measure of a reversal: the place where Ricciardo’s rules once shaped her life becomes the place where his loss is made visible. The tale’s comic ending depends on that contrast, while its limited description of the city keeps attention on the marriage and on the consequences of Ricciardo’s own arrangement.