Rimini

Rimini is the setting for a tale about domestic confinement and jealousy in the Seventh Day of the Decameron. There, a wealthy merchant’s suspicion turns his home into a place of strict surveillance; within that restricted space, his wife searches for a way to exercise a choice of her own.

Setting and Identification

The story identifies Rimini as the city where a rich merchant, prosperous in both lands and money, lives with his beautiful wife. The account does not further describe the city or give it a role in the action beyond locating the household. Its importance is concentrated indoors: the wife is kept from weddings, entertainments, church, and even standing at a window.

The Household and Its Boundaries

The merchant’s jealousy is presented as groundless. He loves his wife and considers her beautiful, then imagines that every man must desire her and that she seeks to please others as she pleases him. His suspicions produce a confinement likened to imprisonment: she is watched so closely that she dares not look out of the house. The tale thus gives Rimini’s domestic setting a sharply limited geography, measured by the activities and thresholds from which she is barred.

Unable to make contact with anyone passing in the street, the wife searches the wall shared with the adjoining house. She discovers a narrow fissure that looks into a bedchamber and, with the help of a compassionate maid, learns that the young neighbor Filippo sleeps there alone. By dropping pebbles and other small objects when he is in the room, she draws him to the opening and begins speaking with him. The crack in the wall becomes a small counter-space to the merchant’s surveillance: a concealed route toward conversation and possible companionship.

Narrative Significance

Fiammetta introduces the episode as an indictment of jealous husbands who restrict their wives’ ordinary pleasures and freedom of movement. Rimini is therefore not merely a place-name attached to the tale: the household’s walls make the consequences of jealousy visible, while the fissure marks the wife’s first practical response to confinement. The narrative presents this particular case, rather than establishing a general account of life in the city.