The Love Affair of Simona and Pasquino

The Love Affair of Simona and Pasquino is a story of reciprocal desire cut short by a sudden death and nearly distorted by suspicion. Its lovers, both of modest means, find one another through the wool trade and seek a private refuge in a garden; there, an ordinary sage bush becomes the instrument of a fatal accident. When Simona dies beside Pasquino after repeating his gesture, the cause of their deaths emerges only after her innocence has been placed in doubt.

Identity and Circumstances

Simona is a young woman in Florence, described as handsome and agreeable within her station. Her father is poor, and she earns her bread by spinning wool with her own hands. The story stresses that poverty does not keep her from love: although she initially longs for Pasquino without daring to act, she is not represented as lacking feeling or capacity for attachment. Pasquino is a young man of no greater social standing. He distributes wool for his master, a wool merchant, and becomes especially attentive to the quality of Simona’s spinning. Their work brings them into contact, but it is also the setting in which their attraction first develops. The relationship grows between people whose daily lives are shaped by labor rather than leisure or wealth.

A Mutual, Secret Attachment

Pasquino’s pleasing words and manner gradually make Simona receptive to him. As she winds each hank of yarn around her spindle, she sighs for the man who entrusted her with the wool, desiring him but at first not venturing further. Pasquino, meanwhile, watches her work more diligently than that of any other spinner, as though her yarn alone could supply all the cloth his master required. His attentiveness gives their private desire a practical, workaday form. Their courtship becomes openly reciprocal. Pasquino grows bolder, Simona lays aside some of her customary timidity, and they enter into mutual pleasures by common agreement. The narrator emphasizes that neither waits passively for the other to initiate: each is ready to invite the other. Their intimacy deepens through repetition, becoming more ardent as it continues. Pasquino eventually asks Simona to meet him in a garden, where they can be together with less risk of attracting suspicion. On a Sunday after dinner, she tells her father that she intends to go to a religious pardon and sets out with a friend. At the appointed garden, Pasquino is waiting with a companion of his. The companion and Simona’s friend form an attachment of their own, allowing the two lovers to withdraw to another part of the garden. Secrecy, then, is not simply a condition imposed on the affair: the lovers arrange their meeting and company to make private time possible.

The Garden and the Sage

In their part of the garden stands a large, handsome sage bush. Simona and Pasquino sit beneath it and spend a long time together, discussing a meal they mean to share there. Pasquino then plucks a sage leaf and rubs his teeth and gums with it, claiming that sage cleans away anything left after eating. The gesture is casual and familiar, an incidental act within an intimate visit. Soon after, Pasquino’s expression changes. He loses sight and speech and dies shortly afterward. Simona cries out for help; when her friend and Pasquino’s companion arrive, they find his body swollen and marked with dark spots. The companion immediately accuses Simona of poisoning him. The sudden bodily change, the lovers’ secluded meeting, and her visible grief combine to make the accusation seem plausible to those who gather, even though the story offers no evidence that she harmed him.

Accusation, Demonstration, and Death

Simona is taken weeping to the provost’s palace. Pasquino’s companion and two other men press the charge, while the judge questions her and cannot establish that she acted maliciously or was guilty. Because he does not understand her account, he has her brought back to the place where Pasquino’s body lies and examines the scene himself. At the sage bush, Simona recounts what happened and repeats Pasquino’s action, rubbing a leaf against her teeth to make the sequence clear. The men who have accused her dismiss her explanation and continue demanding that she be punished by fire. As she stands confused by grief and frightened by the threatened punishment, she suffers the same sudden collapse as Pasquino and dies. Her action turns an explanation into a demonstration, but at the cost of her life: the danger she is trying to clarify overtakes her before she can be formally vindicated.

Discovery and Narrative Significance

The judge orders the bush cut down to its roots and thrown into the fire so that it cannot harm anyone else. Only when the great plant has been levelled does the cause appear: a huge toad is found beneath it, and those present conclude that its pestilential breath had rendered the sage poisonous. The explanation shifts the deaths from suspected murder to accidental poisoning and makes clear why the lovers’ repeated gesture had the same consequence. Simona and Pasquino are buried together in the church of St. Paul by the men who had gathered around the accusation. Their relationship, begun in mutual desire and sustained through secret meetings, ends not in marriage or separation by choice but in a shared death. The episode’s garden setting links pleasure, concealment, and danger: the place chosen to protect the lovers’ time together becomes the site where their intimacy is exposed to the law and where its cause can finally be understood. Emilia’s framing also recalls another story of a woman who loses her beloved in a garden, while distinguishing Simona’s outcome: her innocence is not secured through an argument or escape, but through the discovery that explains how she died.