The donkey-skull signal

In the tale of Mistress Tessa and Federigo di Neri Pegolotti, The donkey-skull signal turns an ordinary object in a vineyard into a private system for arranging secret meetings. Its practical simplicity is also its weakness: the skull can be turned by someone who knows nothing of the lovers’ code, transforming a sign of welcome into a dangerous summons. When that confusion brings Federigo to the house while Gianni Lotteringhi is there, Mistress Tessa meets the risk not by explaining the signal but by recasting the knock as a haunting.

The Signal and Its Meaning

Mistress Tessa is staying for the summer at a country house in Camerata, where Gianni sometimes joins her for supper and the night before returning in the morning to his shop. Tessa is discreet and well advised, while Gianni is presented as simple-minded. She and Federigo are in love, and arrange a way to meet without having to send her serving-maid to fetch him each time.

On a vine pole in a vineyard adjoining the house, they place an ass’s skull. Its muzzle turned toward Florence means Federigo should come that evening after dark; turned toward Fiesole, it means he should stay away because Gianni will be at the house. The code translates the husband’s expected presence into a visible direction. Federigo is to knock softly three times if the door is shut, and Tessa will let him in. The arrangement is repeated often, making the skull a continuing instrument of their affair rather than a one-time signal.

A Meeting at the Wrong Time

The signal’s reliability fails on an evening when Federigo expects to sup with Tessa. Gianni, who is not expected, arrives late. Tessa is dismayed: she and Gianni eat salt pork, while she has the maid carry two cooked capons, newly laid eggs, and wine into a garden where she sometimes meets Federigo. The food is left beneath a peach-tree, ready for the lover, but Tessa forgets to tell the maid to wait and warn him that Gianni has come.

Federigo arrives and knocks. Gianni hears the first knock and, after a pause, hears a second. Tessa has heard him too, but pretends to wake only when Gianni draws her attention to the sound. She tells her husband that it is a phantom which has frightened her on recent nights, and that she hides under the bedclothes until daylight. Gianni answers with confidence in the prayers he said and the signs of the cross he made over the bed, reasoning that the apparition cannot harm them.

The excuse converts the lovers’ signal into a performance for the husband. Tessa calls upon the phantom three times, then returns to bed as though the threat has passed. Federigo understands the conjuration, goes to the garden, finds the capons, wine, and eggs beneath the peach-tree, and takes them home for supper. The mistake has not brought him to the bedroom, but the food set aside for him prevents the failed meeting from ending in hunger.

The Skull’s Accidental Reversal

The tale also offers another explanation for how the signal may have gone wrong. In one version, a farmer passing through the vineyard strikes the skull with a stick; it spins around, leaving its muzzle turned toward Florence. Federigo reads the changed direction as Tessa’s summons and comes to the house. In this account, Tessa’s conjuration tells the phantom to go in God’s name and explains that she did not turn the ass’s head herself; another person did, while she is in bed with Gianni. Federigo then goes away without supper or lodging.

The two accounts differ in their consequences. In the first, Federigo recognizes Tessa’s cover story, reaches the garden, and takes the food. In the second, the false signal brings him to a closed opportunity, and he leaves empty-handed. Both make the skull vulnerable to unintended movement, but only the first leaves the lovers able to turn the interruption into a practical success.

Competing Versions and Comic Function

The narrator declines to resolve the discrepancy. A neighbor, described as an elderly woman who heard the story as a child, says that both incidents were true, but that the skull’s accidental turning and the explanation to the phantom happened not to Gianni Lotteringhi, but to another Gianni, Gianni di Nello, who lived at Porta San Piero and was just as much of a simpleton. The ladies are invited to choose whichever version, or even both, they prefer.

That open ending makes the signal more than a clever device for clandestine meetings. Its meaning depends on interpretation: Federigo reads the skull’s direction as an instruction, while the husband never understands that a sign is operating at all. The possible twist by a farmer exposes how easily a supposedly private code can be altered by chance. Tessa’s phantom story supplies a second, verbal code, improvised when the first has failed. Across the competing versions, the skull’s comic power lies in the distance between its apparent simplicity and the complicated chain of expectation, mistake, concealment, and storytelling it sets in motion.