Tedaldo's self-imposed exile

Tedaldo's self-imposed exile is the deliberate withdrawal of Tedaldo Elisei from Florence after Ermellina, the married woman he loves, suddenly ends their relationship. What begins as a response to private heartbreak becomes a seven-year life under another name: away from his former home, he establishes himself as a successful merchant, but neither distance nor prosperity extinguishes his attachment. His eventual return brings him into a city where his absence has acquired a dangerous consequence: a man mistaken for him has been murdered, and Aldobrandino Palermini has been accused of the killing.

The rupture and departure

Tedaldo is a noble young Florentine who has been deeply in love with Ermellina, the wife of Aldobrandino Palermini. She had accepted his love for a time, then suddenly withdrew her goodwill. She would not receive his messages or see him. The story does not specify why she broke with him; Tedaldo considers the loss undeserved, but that is his understanding rather than an established explanation. His love had been concealed, so those around him do not recognize it as the cause of his worsening melancholy.

He tries repeatedly to recover the affection he believes he has lost, but his efforts fail. Rather than remain in Florence where Ermellina might see his suffering, he decides to withdraw from the world. The departure is secret: he tells neither friends nor relatives, with one exception, a companion who knows the whole matter. He takes only the money he can obtain and goes first to Ancona. The movement away from home is not presented as a sentence imposed by a court or family; it is a choice made under the pressure of rejected love and the wish to disappear from the sight of the woman he cannot forget.

A new name and a changed life

In Ancona, Tedaldo adopts the name Filippo di Sanlodeccio. He meets a rich merchant, enters his service, and travels with him by ship to Cyprus. The assumed identity enables him to live beyond the circle in which his former attachment was known, while the merchant’s household gives the exile a practical direction beyond mere escape.

Tedaldo’s conduct earns his employer’s confidence. The merchant raises his wages, makes him partly a partner, and entrusts him with a substantial share of his business. Tedaldo manages these affairs with such care and diligence that, over the years, he becomes rich, famous, and influential. This success is a striking counterpoint to his hidden grief: the man who left Florence in melancholy acquires wealth and standing abroad, yet the narrative does not treat professional advancement as emotional recovery.

For seven years he manages to master his longing. He continues to remember Ermellina and to suffer from the love that prompted his departure, but his constancy keeps him from returning. His exile therefore changes his name, occupation, fortune, and location without dissolving the attachment at its center. The interval measures not forgetfulness but endurance.

The song that ends the separation

The turn comes in Cyprus when Tedaldo hears a song he had composed in the past. Its subject was his love for Ermellina, her love for him, and the pleasure he had known with her. Hearing his own earlier account of their relationship brings the buried attachment sharply back into the present. He thinks she cannot have forgotten him, and desire to see her again becomes too strong to endure. The song thus serves as both a remnant of the life he left behind and the immediate cause of his decision to return.

Before setting out, Tedaldo puts his affairs in order. He travels with only one servant to Ancona, sends his property onward to Florence through a friend of his Anconese business partner, and follows secretly behind. He disguises himself as a pilgrim returning from the Holy Sepulchre. The return reverses the secrecy of his departure: he is again approaching Florence, but under an assumed identity and without announcing himself to his friends or kin.

Return to a dangerous misunderstanding

In Florence, Tedaldo lodges at a small inn kept by two brothers near Ermellina’s house and goes first to see whether he can find her. The doors and windows are shut. Their appearance makes him fear that she may have died or moved away, and he turns instead toward the house of his own brothers. There he sees four men dressed in black, a sight that astonishes him because his altered clothing and appearance have made him difficult to recognize.

A nearby cordwainer explains the cause of the mourning: less than a fortnight earlier, a brother who had long been away was murdered. The court has accepted the claim that Aldobrandino Palermini killed him because he was a well-wisher of Aldobrandino’s wife and had returned secretly to be with her. Tedaldo realizes that the dead man resembled him closely enough to be taken for him. He is distressed at Aldobrandino’s misfortune, while also learning that Ermellina is alive and well. Thus the return that began with the hope of seeing his former mistress immediately confronts him with a public confusion produced by his absence: another man has died in his place, and her husband is imprisoned on that account.

The exile’s course is shaped by repeated contrasts: secrecy against recognition, commercial success against continuing sorrow, and seven years of restraint against the sudden force of a remembered song. Tedaldo’s self-imposed separation ends not with a quiet restoration of his former life but with his discovery that his place in Florence has been occupied, in the most literal and perilous sense, by a mistaken likeness.