Treviso is the setting of a story in which a supposed miracle draws a city into a crowded religious gathering, and a prank intended to exploit that gathering nearly costs Martellino his life. The city’s Cathedral becomes the focus of popular devotion and disorder: after Arrigo’s death, the townspeople carry his body there and bring the sick to seek healing, while armed guards try to prevent a riot. In that charged public space, a theatrical deception turns quickly into a beating, an arrest, and the threat of execution.

Arrigo and the Cathedral

Arrigo is described as a poor German who earned his living carrying burdens for hire. The people of Treviso regarded him as holy and good. According to what the Trevisans themselves claimed, the bells of the great church began ringing without anyone pulling them at the hour of his death. The townspeople took this as a miracle, proclaimed Arrigo a saint, and carried his body to the Cathedral.

The belief drew a crowd seeking cures. The halt, the impotent, the blind, and others afflicted by illness or disability were brought to the body in hopes that touching it would heal them. The gathering grew so large that the lord of the city stationed German and other armed men at the Cathedral to prevent disorder. Treviso is thus presented not simply as a place of private devotion but as a city where religious excitement had become a public, tightly controlled event.

The Deception and Its Reversal

Amid the crowds, three visiting townsmen arrived: Stecchi, Martellino, and Marchese. They made their living entertaining spectators at princely and noble courts by disguising themselves and imitating other people through unusual movements and grimaces. Having never been to Treviso before, they were curious about the crowds and went to learn what had happened. Marchese worried that the armed guards and packed church would make it impossible to reach the saint’s body; Martellino proposed a way through.

Martellino would pretend to be crippled, with Stecchi and Marchese supporting him as though they were bringing him to the saint to be healed. In a secluded place, he twisted his hands, fingers, arms, legs, mouth, eyes, and entire face until he looked completely palsied. The companions then approached the Cathedral displaying apparent distress and asking people to make way for them. The crowd yielded, and Martellino was carried to Arrigo’s body by gentlemen who hoped the saint might heal him.

The trick collapsed when a man recognized Martellino as someone he had previously seen walking freely. The crowd immediately treated the performance as mockery of the saint and of those seeking his aid. People pulled Martellino down, tore his clothes, and beat him with fists and kicks; even as he cried for mercy, the assault intensified. Stecchi and Marchese feared the crowd would kill him and dared not openly intervene. Their own cries for his death concealed their attempt to think of a way to get him out of the crowd’s hands.

Arrest, Judgment, and Rescue

Marchese found an opening in the presence of the city’s officers outside the church. Rather than identify Martellino as his companion, he told the officer commanding for the Provost that a thief inside had stolen a purse containing a hundred gold florins. A dozen sergeants pushed through the crowd and dragged Martellino away, bruised and disheveled. The rescue from mob violence delivered him into another danger: people who considered themselves insulted by the prank claimed in turn that he had stolen their purses, and the judge began examining him as a suspected cutpurse.

The judge ordered Martellino tortured on the strappado to force a confession and intended to have him hanged. Martellino asked that each accuser be made to say when and where the theft had occurred. Their accounts contradicted his recent arrival in Treviso: some placed the alleged theft days earlier, while others said it had happened that same day. Martellino pointed to the city’s register of strangers and to his host as witnesses that he had arrived only hours before and had gone straight to the Cathedral, where he had been beaten.

Stecchi and Marchese, hearing that the judge had already tortured their companion, sought help from their host. He brought them to Sandro Agolanti, who lived in Treviso and had considerable influence with the prince. After hearing the case, Sandro went to the prince and persuaded him to summon Martellino. The judge resisted surrendering the prisoner, partly because he bore a grudge against the people of Florence, but the prince’s order prevailed.

The City’s Contrasts

Brought before the prince, Martellino explained what had happened and asked to be allowed to leave; even then, he feared that the noose would seem to hang around his neck until he was back in Florence. The prince laughed at the misadventure and gave each of the three companions a suit of clothes. They returned home safe, having escaped a danger they had not imagined when they entered the church.

The episode sets Treviso’s public religious fervor beside the unstable justice that follows the prank. The crowd’s effort to protect the sanctity of Arrigo’s body becomes collective violence, while the official intervention that stops the beating leads to a coercive prosecution on weak and inconsistent accusations. In the end, the decisive protection comes not from an orderly hearing but from Sandro Agolanti’s influence with the prince, whose intervention turns a threatened execution into a comic release.