Rome

Rome serves the Decameron as more than a backdrop: it is at once the seat of religious authority, a city shaped by political change, and a place from which lovers flee or exiles seek refuge. Its episodes repeatedly test the distance between institutions and the conduct of individuals. Most strikingly, a Jewish visitor concludes that Christianity is true not because Rome’s clergy embody its teachings, but because the faith continues to flourish despite their corruption.

Religious Authority and the Test of Conduct

In the story of Abraham, Rome is the destination of a deliberate investigation. Jehannot de Chevigné has urged his Jewish friend to become Christian, but Abraham will not accept arguments alone. He proposes to visit Rome, observe the pope and the senior clergy, and decide whether their conduct confirms the superiority of the Christian faith. Jehannot recognizes the danger: he expects that a direct encounter with the papal court’s way of life will undo his efforts at conversion.

Abraham is honorably received by his fellow Jews in Rome. Without disclosing why he has come, he studies the pope, cardinals, prelates, and other members of the court, combining his own observations with what he learns from others. He finds sexual misconduct at every level, including behavior described by the narrator as both contrary to nature and unrestrained by shame. He also observes gluttony, drunkenness, and a pursuit of money that extends to the buying and selling of sacred things and church benefices. The clergy, he concludes, disguise simony as procuration and gluttony as sustentation: in Rome, even the language of religious service is made to cover appetite and commerce.

On his return to Paris, Abraham tells Jehannot that he saw no piety, devotion, good example, or good works among the churchmen he observed. He describes the papal court as a workshop of diabolical rather than divine things and reasons that its leaders appear intent on undermining the religion they ought to support. Yet Christianity has not been extinguished; it continues to grow brighter. That contradiction becomes Abraham’s decisive evidence that the Holy Spirit, rather than the clergy’s conduct, sustains the faith. Rome’s institutional failure thus produces an unexpected reversal: the inspection Jehannot feared becomes the occasion of Abraham’s conversion and baptism in Paris.

The Papal Court and a Public Marriage

Rome also becomes the stage on which a private commitment is brought before religious authority. Alessandro travels there with an abbot and his company. During the journey, he has discovered that the person traveling as an abbot is a young woman, the daughter of the King of England. She explains that she fled a proposed marriage to the elderly King of Scotland and intends to choose Alessandro instead. The two exchange a ring and plight their troth privately before an image of Christ; the rest of the company does not know where Alessandro has spent the night.

In Rome, the woman presents their case to the pope. She explains that her principal reason for traveling has been removed: she has already chosen the husband she believes God intended for her. She asks for the pope’s blessing and for the union, contracted in private, to be made known publicly. The two knights accompanying her are enraged when they learn her identity and choice, while the pope is astonished by both her disguise and her decision. He nevertheless calms the knights and consents to her request.

The pope arranges a magnificent feast attended by cardinals and other distinguished guests. The woman appears in royal dress, and Alessandro, now splendidly attired, no longer looks like the young man who had lent money at interest. In the presence of the assembly, the pope solemnly celebrates their marriage anew and sends them away with his blessing. Rome therefore gives public and institutional recognition to a relationship first contracted in secrecy. The couple then travels to Florence, where the woman frees Alessandro’s three brothers after paying what is owed, and later reaches Paris. The King of England receives his daughter and son-in-law; Alessandro is knighted, made Earl of Cornwall, and eventually helps reconcile the king with his son.

A City of Departure and Unequal Alliances

Rome is also the point of departure for Pietro Boccamazza and Agnolella, whose love crosses a social divide. Pietro belongs to a distinguished Roman family; Agnolella is the daughter of a plebeian who is nevertheless dear to the Romans. When Pietro’s relatives learn that he wants to marry her, they rebuke him and warn Agnolella’s father against treating the proposal seriously. Pietro sees little prospect of winning her through an accepted family alliance, so, after confirming that she is willing, he arranges their flight from Rome.

They set out early on horseback toward Anagni, where Pietro has trusted friends. Fear of pursuit leaves them no time to marry before leaving. Their escape quickly turns dangerous: about eight miles from Rome, Pietro takes the wrong path, and roughly two miles farther on they are seen by armed men emerging from a small castle. Agnolella spots the threat first, turns her horse toward a nearby wood, and escapes at a gallop. Pietro, distracted by looking at her rather than the road, is caught. Before his captors can carry out their plan to strip him and hang him, another armed group appears and the attackers turn to face it.

After further dangers, Pietro and Agnolella find one another at a mountain castle. Its lady initially rebukes Pietro for acting against his relatives’ wishes, but recognizes that both lovers are resolved and that their intention is honorable. She arranges their marriage at the castle and promises to help reconcile Pietro with his family. A few days later, the couple returns to Rome under escort. The lady makes peace between Pietro and his angry kin, and the two live together in peace into old age. Rome is thus both the source of the family conflict and the place to which the couple returns after their union has been secured elsewhere.

Exile, Recognition, and Chosen Kinship

In the story of Titus Quintius Fulvus and Gisippus, Rome belongs to the wider political frame of the Roman Empire under Octavianus Cæsar’s Triumvirate. Titus is sent from Rome to Athens to study philosophy, where he forms an unusually deep friendship with Gisippus. Years later, political troubles expel Gisippus and his household from Athens. Reduced to poverty, he travels to Rome to find Titus, now influential among the Romans.

Gisippus waits outside Titus’s house, too ashamed of his wretched appearance to speak. Titus passes without recognizing him. Taking this as a deliberate rejection, Gisippus wanders through the city hungry and penniless, and spends the night in a deserted cavern. There he witnesses a thief kill his companion during a quarrel over stolen goods. When the watch arrests Gisippus, he falsely confesses to the murder and is condemned to die. Titus eventually hears what has happened and, in court, claims the crime for himself in an attempt to save his friend. Gisippus then insists that he committed the murder, while the actual killer comes forward and confesses.

Octavianus summons the three men, hears their accounts, releases the two friends as innocent, and pardons the murderer out of affection for them. Titus takes Gisippus home, reproaches him for losing faith in their friendship, and welcomes him with rest, food, clothing, and a share in his wealth and estates. Titus’s wife, Sophronia, receives Gisippus as a brother, and Titus gives him his sister Fulvia in marriage. Gisippus, barred from returning to his native land by exile, settles in Rome. The two couples live in one house for many years, their friendship deepening alongside their shared life. In this episode, the city where the friends’ bond is nearly lost through poverty and mistaken rejection becomes the place where it is restored through mutual sacrifice and hospitality.

Political Change and Narrative Significance

The stories place Rome in different kinds of motion: Abraham arrives to examine religious authority; Alessandro reaches it to have a marriage publicly affirmed; Pietro and Agnolella flee it to escape family opposition and later return; Gisippus enters it as an impoverished exile and finds a new home. These movements make the city a point where private intentions meet institutions, social rank, and public judgment.

Rome’s standing is also presented as historically altered. In introducing Pietro’s story, the narrator calls it once the head of the world and, in the present, its tail. The accompanying explanation connects this contrast to the papal court’s removal to Avignon under Clement V and its eventual return to Rome under Gregory XI in 1376. The city’s diminished present status gives the lovers’ departure a political as well as geographical resonance. Across the collection, Rome remains a place of concentrated authority, but the stories judge that authority by what people do: corrupt clergy fail to disprove the faith, a pope validates a freely chosen union, and a powerful citizen turns his household into a refuge for a banished friend.