Zeppa’s payback against Spinelloccio is a domestic revenge tale in which discovery does not lead to a public scandal or a fight, but to an exacting exchange. When Zeppa di Mino finds his close companion Spinelloccio Tanena with Zeppa’s wife, he keeps silent, plans his response, and makes Spinelloccio witness a matching betrayal from inside a chest. The final reconciliation turns the story’s apparent reckoning into an agreement among all four people, exposing how far the two men’s idea of friendship can stretch when their wives become its currency.

The Companions and the Betrayal

Fiammetta tells of two young men from good families in Siena, living next door to one another in Camollia. Zeppa di Mino and Spinelloccio Tanena appear to be exceptionally close, keeping one another’s company and loving each other like brothers, or even more. Each has a beautiful wife. That intimacy provides the conditions for the betrayal: Spinelloccio’s frequent visits to Zeppa’s house, whether Zeppa is present or away, bring him into private familiarity with Zeppa’s wife, and the two begin an affair that continues for some time without discovery.

The breach becomes visible when Zeppa is home but remains unknown to his wife. Spinelloccio arrives, is told that Zeppa is away, and goes straight into the house. Finding Zeppa’s wife alone in the sitting room, he embraces and kisses her, and she returns his affection. Zeppa watches without revealing himself. He sees them go together into a chamber and lock the door, learning not just that they are lovers but that the trusted companion who has been welcomed into his home has made use of that trust.

Zeppa’s Quiet Counterplan

Zeppa does not confront the pair at once. He judges that an outcry would neither undo the injury nor reduce the shame, and instead considers how to satisfy himself without allowing the affair to become widely known. He waits until Spinelloccio leaves, then enters the chamber and finds his wife still adjusting the head-veils Spinelloccio had disarranged. She admits what happened after Zeppa tells her he has seen more than he wished.

Zeppa offers her pardon on a condition: the next morning, around tierce, she must arrange for Spinelloccio to visit again, hide him in a chest when Zeppa returns, and obey further instructions. He promises not to hurt Spinelloccio. His wife, frightened and eager to satisfy him, agrees. The chest thus becomes the central instrument of the counterplot: it conceals the lover while ensuring that he will remain present, though unseen, for the reversal Zeppa has planned.

The next morning, Spinelloccio gives Zeppa an excuse for leaving early, claiming he must dine with a friend and discuss an affair. Zeppa points out that it is not yet dinner-time, but Spinelloccio insists on going. He takes a roundabout way to Zeppa’s house and enters a chamber with Zeppa’s wife. When she hears Zeppa return, she feigns alarm and ushers Spinelloccio into the chest, locking him inside as instructed.

The Reversal Above the Chest

Zeppa then directs his wife to invite Spinelloccio’s wife to dine with them, explaining that Spinelloccio has gone to dine elsewhere and left her alone. Once the other woman arrives, Zeppa welcomes her and takes her by the hand into the chamber. He locks the door behind them. When she asks what he intends, he explains that he knows Spinelloccio has been sleeping with his wife and that he means to answer the injury in kind: Spinelloccio has had Zeppa’s wife, so Zeppa will have Spinelloccio’s.

Zeppa presents the choice as his guest’s: she can consent, or he can take Spinelloccio from the chest and retaliate in a way that would leave neither of them glad. She agrees after he promises that, whatever happens, she and Zeppa’s wife can remain at peace with one another. He also promises her a precious jewel. He then lays her on the chest and sleeps with her while Spinelloccio listens from inside and feels the movement above him. The scene makes the hidden chest more than a hiding place: it turns Spinelloccio into the involuntary witness of a betrayal deliberately fashioned to mirror his own.

From Revenge to Agreement

At first Spinelloccio is so furious that he feels he might die of vexation, and he would rebuke his wife if fear of Zeppa did not restrain him. But he reconsiders: the offense began with him, Zeppa has acted within his rights, and Zeppa has treated him humanely, like a comrade. Instead of escalating the quarrel, Spinelloccio resolves to be more than ever Zeppa’s friend.

When Zeppa has finished, Spinelloccio’s wife asks for the promised jewel. Zeppa opens the chamber door and calls his own wife in. She remarks, laughing, that her guest has given her a loaf in exchange for her bannock. Zeppa then opens the chest and reveals Spinelloccio, calling him the jewel he had promised. The two exposed spouses are equally abashed: Spinelloccio knows Zeppa witnessed the original affair and has now heard and felt the retaliation, while his wife sees that her husband has learned what happened above him.

Spinelloccio comes out and declares that they are quits. He proposes that the two men remain friends as before and, since nothing else is unshared between them, share their wives as well. Zeppa accepts. All four dine together in harmony, and the narrator reports that thereafter each woman has two husbands and each man two wives, without further strife or resentment. The resolution is neither a return to the former arrangement nor a punishment imposed on one adulterous partner. Instead, the story ends with the two men converting a personal injury into a mutual pact, while the women’s place in that pact is described through the men’s bargain.

The Tale’s Measure of Revenge

Fiammetta introduces the tale as a gentler answer to the severity of the scholar’s revenge in the preceding story. Her stated measure is that a person avenging an injury should give back as much as was received, without inflicting harm beyond what the quarrel requires. Zeppa’s plan follows that principle in comic form: he answers Spinelloccio’s adultery with an equivalent act, but chooses secrecy, staged exposure, and eventual reconciliation instead of physical violence or public disgrace.

The sequence depends on controlled knowledge. Zeppa first sees the affair without being seen; later, Spinelloccio hears the counter-affair without being able to intervene; finally, the chest is opened and the hidden witness is made visible. Each reversal changes who knows what, while the chamber and chest keep the conflict within the household. The ending’s easy harmony is presented as the outcome of the men’s agreement, but it also gives the joke its sharpest edge: the friendship survives by redefining the wives as something the companions can share. What begins as an effort to balance betrayal concludes in a compact that makes the original breach and its retaliation the basis of a new domestic arrangement.