Ricciardo il Zima

Ricciardo il Zima, a rich young man of modest family in Pistoia, converts a costly gift into the opportunity to speak with the woman he loves. His eloquence cannot make her answer while her husband is present, but it changes how she understands her own desire. When she later sends the signal he proposed, their secret meetings begin. His story turns courtship into a contest over who can control speech, silence, and the meaning of an exchange.

Identity and Introduction

Ricciardo is introduced as a young man whose social standing and appearance sit in contrast: he is of little family, yet very wealthy, dresses with conspicuous elegance, and is known for being exceptionally fine in his person. He owns one of the handsomest palfreys in Tuscany and prizes it for its beauty. His public name, Ricciardo il Zima, is associated with his fashionable distinction; in the episode, however, his wealth and possessions matter less as status markers than as instruments he can put at the service of his desire.

For a long time he has loved and courted the beautiful wife of Francesco Vergellesi, without success. The story presents his attachment as already well known: people tell Francesco that, because of Ricciardo’s love for his wife, he may be able to obtain the palfrey by asking for it. Francesco is wealthy and capable in other respects, but notably covetous. He sees an opportunity to secure the horse, and Ricciardo sees an opportunity to turn the proposed transaction to his own advantage.

The Palfrey and the Bargain

Francesco asks Ricciardo for the palfrey in a way that would let him present it as a gift. Ricciardo refuses to sell it, but offers to give it on one condition: he must be allowed to speak a few words with Francesco’s wife in her husband’s presence, at a distance from everyone else, so that no one but she can hear him. The bargain is explicit, but its terms are unequal in interpretation. Francesco believes he is exploiting a lover’s devotion to obtain a valuable horse; Ricciardo accepts the cost because the arrangement gives him access to the woman, even if only for a single conversation.

Francesco takes his wife aside and instructs her not to answer Ricciardo at all. She objects to the arrangement, but complies with her husband’s command and comes to the saloon. Ricciardo renews the bargain and sits with her apart from the others. The palfrey is therefore not simply a gift exchanged for speech: it buys a carefully limited occasion in which her husband has tried to dictate what she may say, while Ricciardo hopes to make silence speak for him.

A Speech in Two Voices

Ricciardo addresses the wife with an elaborate declaration of devotion. He presents his love as enduring beyond his life and describes himself and everything he owns as wholly hers. He asks for compassion, not as a claim she must honor, but as the one response that could relieve his suffering. The speech draws on the long courtship already behind them: his jousts, serenades, and other efforts had not moved her before. Now, however, his words affect her. Though she remains silent as instructed, her sighs and glances disclose what she cannot say aloud.

When no spoken answer comes, Ricciardo recognizes the husband’s device. Rather than stop, he answers himself, taking the wife’s part in an imagined exchange. In this invented response, she explains that her former coldness concealed love, promises that she will meet him after Francesco has departed for Milan, and gives him a precise signal: two napkins displayed at the garden window. Ricciardo then resumes his own role and responds as though he has received her promise. The performance is not an actual agreement made by the wife in that room. Its importance is that it gives form to a possibility she has not yet voiced, while her visible reactions suggest that she is listening differently than before.

Francesco asks whether Ricciardo has kept his promise to speak with her. Ricciardo replies that he has spoken with a marble statue. The husband accepts the answer as proof of his wife’s silence and believes her virtue confirmed; he also considers the palfrey his. Ricciardo, by contrast, remarks that Francesco has acquired the horse without giving him the return he had hoped for. The scene’s irony lies in the gap between what the husband thinks he has purchased and what Ricciardo’s speech has set in motion.

The Signal and the Affair

After Francesco leaves to take up the provostship in Milan, his wife recalls Ricciardo’s words, his love, and the palfrey he gave for her sake. She weighs her youth, her opportunity, and the prospect that a lover like him may not come again. She decides that it is better to act and repent than to abstain and repent, and places the two napkins at the garden window, exactly as Ricciardo had proposed.

That evening Ricciardo comes alone and secretly to the garden gate. Finding it open, he passes through another door into the house, where the wife is waiting. She rises to meet him with joy; they go to her chamber and begin their affair. The signal establishes that the decisive invitation is now hers, not merely a role Ricciardo supplied in his imagined conversation. Their first meeting is not their last: Ricciardo visits repeatedly while Francesco remains in Milan and continues to return even after Francesco comes home.

Narrative Role and Significance

Elisa introduces the tale with the warning that people who presume to test another person’s wit may discover that they have outwitted themselves. Francesco’s scheme to gain a palfrey while controlling his wife’s response supplies the example: he secures the horse, but mistakes silence for an unchanged disposition. Ricciardo’s ingenuity helps create the opportunity, yet the story gives the wife a decisive part in the outcome. Her sighs and glances are the first signs of change; her later signal makes that change an action.

Ricciardo’s courtship is thus both material and rhetorical. He gives up a prized horse for access to a conversation, uses a performed dialogue to make a future meeting imaginable, and waits for the woman to confirm it through the agreed sign. The ending extends the reversal beyond Francesco’s departure: the affair persists after the husband returns. Ricciardo’s success rests not simply on eloquence, but on recognizing that a conversation apparently ended in silence has altered the terms of the relationship.