Character guide

Calandrino

major

Also known as Quoth Calandrino, Methinketh Calandrino, the unhappy Calandrino

Calandrino is the neighborhood simpleton of Florence's painter guild, forever the butt of Bruno and Buffalmacco's elaborate practical jokes. His defining flaw is a bottomless gullibility wedded to greed: he will believe any scheme that promises him profit or pleasure, and his friends exploit this with a craftsman's patience. He matters because his disasters form a comic throughline across the Decameron, turning each of his humiliations into a mirror for the reader's own readiness to believe what flatters.

Andreuccio di Pietro

major

Also known as Andreuccio, Pietro, Pietro Boccamazza

Andreuccio arrives in Naples flush with cash and vanity, and his eagerness to be thought a fine young man makes him easy prey for a beautiful woman who calls him brother. His real education begins in Malpertugio, where each misadventure strips away another layer of his innocence — through a latrine, a tomb, and a stolen ring. His story is the Decameron's great comic descent into experience, a provincial boy learning that the world's kindness is rarely free.

Messer Torello d'Istria

major

Also known as Torello, Messer Torello, Messer Torello de Dignes

Messer Torello is the soul of courtesy, a lord who treats an unknown traveler with such generosity that he gives away his own wife's jewels to clothe him. When he leaves for the Crusade, he leaves behind a wife he adores and a debt of honor he cannot know will be called in. His story is the Decameron's great fantasy of hospitality rewarded, where a nobleman's virtue travels further than any army and returns to him at the moment of his greatest need.

Tedaldo Elisei

major

Also known as Tedaldo

Tedaldo is a lover of the old school — faithful, resourceful, and willing to wait. Exiled from Florence after a quarrel, he comes home in pilgrim's garb to discover his lady has married another, and rather than rage or despair, he engineers a quiet reconciliation. His story is the Decameron's meditation on constancy: love that survives absence, disguise, and another man's ring, and the question of whether a woman's heart can be reclaimed by merit alone.

Bruno

supporting

Also known as Quoth Bruno

Bruno is the mastermind of the painterly trio that torments Calandrino, a man who can spin a lie so elaborate it takes days to unfold. He is not cruel — his pranks are born of wit and boredom — but he is relentless, and his pleasure in watching Calandrino believe the impossible is the engine of the Decameron's funniest sequences. He matters because he shows how intelligence without malice can still be merciless, and because his schemes give the book its purest comedy.

Ricciardo Minutolo

major

Also known as Ricciardo, Ricciardo Manardi

Ricciardo is a man of rank and patience, tormented by his love for another man's wife and by the jealousy that keeps him from enjoying it. His scheme is audacious: he convinces the lady that her husband is having an affair, then arranges a moonlit meeting in which he plays the husband's role. His story is the Decameron's sharpest study of jealousy turned into strategy, and of how a clever man can make a woman's own suspicion the instrument of her seduction.

Gisippus

major

Gisippus belongs to Athens's elite, a young man of wealth, learning, and unblemished reputation whose friendship with the Roman Titus has become the talk of the city. When Titus falls dangerously ill from loving Gisippus's bride-to-be, Gisippus must weigh a public betrothal and family honor against the bond he prizes above all. His choice tests whether perfect friendship can survive the claims of love, family, and civic expectation, and sets up the debt that will define both men's fates.

Cimon

major

Also known as Pasimondas, thy Cimon

Cimon is the embarrassment of his father Aristippus's house: hulking, uncouth, and seemingly incapable of letters or courtesy, kept in the countryside like a beast. Love arrives as a literal ambush — he stumbles upon Iphigenia sleeping in a meadow and is remade, begging for fine clothes, mastering philosophy, song, and arms within four years. His transformation is the tale's central spectacle, but it also breeds a dangerous fixation: the same intensity that civilizes him may not stop at courtship.

Titus Quintius Fulvus

major

Also known as Titus, Titus Quintius

Titus arrives in Athens as a promising Roman of senatorial family, lodging with Gisippus and sharing his studies, his table, and his confidence. When he falls hopelessly in love with Gisippus's intended bride, the friendship is tested by an appetite he cannot master and a loyalty he cannot abandon. His illness and recovery force both men into an exchange of obligations that will follow Titus back to Rome, where the favor must eventually be repaid.

Master Ciappelletto

major

Also known as Ciappelletto

Ciappelletto is a perjurer, forger, and blasphemer whose reputation is so foul that no one in France will trust him, which is precisely why a pair of Florentine bankers bring him along to collect debts. Stricken mortally ill in a Burgundian household, he refuses the sacraments unless a holy friar attends him, then spins a confession of such exquisite false piety that the friar weeps. His deathbed performance turns a career of fraud into a posthumous miracle, launching the Decameron's running argument about whether the Church can tell a saint from a scoundrel.

Alessandro Chiarmontesi

major

Also known as Alessandro

Alessandro is one of two young men courting the same Florentine lady, and he is the one reckless enough to accept her grotesque test: climb into the fresh grave of Scannadio, strip the body, and lie in its place until she sends for him. His long interior debate on the way to the tomb — fear of ambush, of mutilation, of being made a fool — reveals a lover whose courage is mostly the product of argument with himself. His willingness to be buried alive for desire makes him the story's comic measure of how far love will push a man.

Nathan

major

Also known as Nathan straightway

Nathan lives in a magnificent palace on the road between Italy and the Levant, where every traveler is fed, lodged, and sent on richer than he came, and his generosity has become a byword across the region. His virtue is tested by Mitridanes, a younger lord whose own hospitality is eclipsed by Nathan's fame and who resolves to murder him. Nathan's response — offering his rival the chance to do it, and then outdoing him in courtesy — turns the tale into a study of whether goodness can be performed without vanity.

Rinaldo d'Asti

major

Also known as Rinaldo, Rinaldo de' Pugliesi

A merchant bound for Naples who is robbed on the road, then rescued by a widow who mistakes him for the lover she has secretly summoned.

Mithridanes

major

Also known as Quoth Mithridanes

A wealthy young man whose envy of a famously generous rival curdles into a murderous scheme to outdo him in liberality.

Fra Alberto

major

Fra Alberto cuts a striking figure in his habit, and he knows it; when a foolish Venetian lady brags of her beauty, he sees an opening and takes it. Posing as the Archangel Gabriel, he arranges moonlit trysts and lets her believe she is beloved of heaven itself. His scheme depends entirely on her vanity and the city's credulity, and both prove dangerously elastic, making his story one of the collection's sharpest satires on clerical hypocrisy.

Nicostratus

major

An aging Argive nobleman whose young wife Lydia, tired of his years, schemes to bed his trusted servant Pyrrhus right under his nose.

Martellino

supporting

Also known as the wretched Martellino

A Florentine trickster who fakes a miraculous cure at a saint's shrine and is nearly torn apart by the furious crowd he fools.

Catella

major

Also known as this Catella

A jealous Florentine wife whose suspicion of her husband is turned against her by a friend's cruel, elaborate practical joke.

Gualtieri

major

Gualtieri is a powerful nobleman who, badgered by his people to marry, chooses the peasant Griselda precisely because she owes him everything. What begins as a display of sovereign whim hardens into a series of escalating ordeals designed to prove her obedience, stripping her of children and status alike. His story anchors the collection's final day, where the question of whether a ruler's cruelty can ever be called love cuts deepest.

Nastagio degli Onesti

major

Also known as Nastagio

Nastagio is a wealthy Ravenna bachelor whose open-handed courtship of a haughty Traversari daughter drains both his purse and his spirits, prompting his kinsmen to pack him off to the countryside. There, wandering lovesick in a pinewood, he stumbles on a supernatural hunt that mirrors his own torment and sees in it a way to move his cruel mistress. His tale turns private heartbreak into public theater, making him one of the Decameron's most memorable strategists of desire.

Ferondo

major

Ferondo is a coarse, suspicious rustic whose possessiveness over his beautiful wife makes him an easy mark for the lustful abbot of a nearby monastery. Drugged, interred, and fed on scraps in a cellar rigged as the afterlife, he is convinced he has died and is being purified for his sins. His gullibility and the abbot's brazen hypocrisy make his tale one of the collection's sharpest satires of clerical corruption and marital folly.

Masetto

major

Masetto is a strong, handsome peasant who reasons that feigned dumbness will get him work and shelter among the nuns of a countryside convent. What he does not anticipate is that the sisters, pent up and curious, will compete for his attentions until he is worn to exhaustion and finally breaks his silence to negotiate terms. His story is a comic inversion of the usual seduction plot, with the naive outsider discovering that the cloister's appetites rival any tavern's.

Landolfo Ruffolo

major

Also known as Landolfo

Landolfo Ruffolo is a Ravello merchant who, unwilling to live modestly, converts his property into goods and sails for Cyprus, only to be wrecked and stripped of everything. Adrift on a chest of treasure he has salvaged, he is carried by currents and fortune through a series of reversals that test whether a ruined man can rebuild. His tale opens the second day's theme of shipwreck and recovery, embodying the Decameron's fascination with fortune's sudden turns.

Salabaetto

major

Salabaetto is a young merchant who arrives in Palermo on business and falls prey to Jancofiore, a courtesan whose charm and staged tears separate him from his goods. Broke and humiliated, he retreats to Florence, where a friend's advice and a fresh consignment of cloth arm him for a return visit. His story is a satisfying reversal of the dupe's tale, showing that the Decameron's merchants can learn as well as lose.

Master Simone

supporting

Also known as Simone, Quoth Master Simone

Master Simone is a self-important doctor in Florence whose vanity about his learning far outstrips his actual wit, making him a favorite target for the city's resident tricksters. His fatal weakness is greed dressed up as scientific curiosity: when Bruno and Buffalmacco dangle the promise of buried treasure before him, he abandons all caution and follows them into the dark. His humiliation belongs to the Decameron's running comedy of clever servants and artisans fleecing the credulous elite, and it shows how quickly professional dignity collapses when avarice takes the wheel.

Saladin

supporting

Saladin rules as sultan, yet he moves through the world incognito, probing the cleverness of a Jewish moneylender with the riddle of three identical rings and later accepting hospitality from Messer Torello without disclosing who he is. His pleasure lies in measuring other men's virtue against his own power, and he repays generosity with a loyalty that outlasts the moment of revelation. He anchors the Decameron's fascination with the traffic between East and West, where wisdom, not rank, determines who truly commands the room.

Ruggieri da Jeroli

major

Also known as Ruggieri, Jeroli

Ruggieri moves through Florence as a young man of family and appetite, fixed on a woman already bound to another man, and the pursuit requires him to navigate the city's codes of honor, secrecy, and revenge. His desire is genuine but reckless, and the story tests whether passion can survive the machinery of betrayal it sets in motion. He belongs to the Decameron's long meditation on love as a force that rearranges social order, and his fate shows how thin the line is between a lover and a fool.

Federigo degli Alberighi

major

Also known as Federigo, Federigo di Neri Pegolotti

Federigo once outshone every bachelor in Tuscany in arms and courtesy, but his lavish pursuit of Madam Giovanna drained his wealth until only a small farm and a remarkable falcon remained. He bears his poverty without complaint, hawking alone at Campi, still in love and too proud to beg. When Giovanna's young son falls ill and longs for the falcon, Federigo faces a choice between his last treasure and his last chance at honor, and the story turns on what a gentleman does when he has nothing left to give.

Messer Angiolieri

supporting

Also known as Angiolieri

Messer Angiolieri guards his marriage with the vigilance of a man who trusts no one, and his jealousy curdles the household into a theater of surveillance and resentment. His wife, far from being cowed, turns his watchfulness against him, and the lover's ingenuity does the rest. His story belongs to the Decameron's recurrent comedy of husbands who mistake control for virtue, and it demonstrates that the cleverest trap is often the one the jailer builds for himself.

Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica

major

Also known as Messer Ricciardo, Ricciardo di Chinzica, Ricciardo

Messer Ricciardo is a respected jurist of Pisa whose learning has done nothing to prepare him for the appetites of a young wife, and he approaches the marriage as though it were a case to be argued and won. His vanity about his own cleverness blinds him to the obvious, and his attempts to regulate desire by rule and calendar become the setup for his own cuckolding. He stands among the Decameron's gallery of husbands whose authority rests on parchment rather than performance, and his story asks what happens when the law meets the body.

Lauretta

supporting

Also known as Boccaccio, Lauretta Boccaccio

Lauretta belongs to the ten Florentine youths who flee plague-stricken Florence for the countryside, and she takes her turn as queen of the day. Her storytelling voice is moral without being cold: she tells of Federigo degli Alberighi, who squanders his fortune courting a lady who ignores him and ends poor but still generous. Through her, Boccaccio argues that nobility of manners outranks nobility of blood, a theme that threads through the whole collection.

Sophronia

supporting

Sophronia stands at the center of one of the Decameron's most testing triangles: she is given to Gisippus, yet Titus, his sworn brother, burns for her. The tension is not hers to resolve alone, but her worth is what makes the men's rivalry so costly, and her voice in the aftermath shapes how the tale judges each of them. Her story lets Boccaccio probe whether friendship or marriage holds the stronger claim on a life.

Madam Beritola Caracciola

major

Also known as Madam Beritola, Beritola

Beritola loses her husband to political exile, her sons to pirates, and herself to a cave on the island of Ponza, where she lives wild and half-clothed until a hunting party finds her. Her refusal to return to the world is the story's sharpest tension: grief has become identity. Currado Malespina's household gradually draws her back, and her slow reentry into society sets the stage for the reunions that the tale's second half works toward.

Ghino di Tacco

major

Also known as Ghino

Ghino is the Decameron's great paradox: an outlaw whose manners shame the men who condemn him. When he seizes the Abbot of Cluny, he does not strip him but treats his gout and his dignity, refusing ransom until the abbot himself asks. The episode matters because it dramatizes Boccaccio's recurring claim that true nobility shows in conduct, not station, and it makes Ghino one of the collection's most quoted figures.

Currado Malespina

major

Also known as Currado

Currado is the bridge between Beritola's island exile and her return to the world: he finds her, pities her, and persuades her into his castle at Lunigiana, where she serves his lady in widow's weeds. His patience with her refusal to be known is the tale's quiet engine, and his household becomes the place where lost children, in time, are recognized. He embodies the Decameron's ideal of the well-born man whose virtue is hospitality rather than display.

Ambrogiuolo

major

Ambrogiuolo is the Decameron's archetypal slanderer: a man so confident in his own cleverness that he stakes his fortune on the claim that every woman can be seduced. His wager with Bernabò turns on a trick rather than a conquest, and the tale's tension lies in whether his lie will be exposed before it destroys an innocent marriage. He matters because his scheme forces the collection to ask what proof of virtue is even possible, and who gets to demand it.

Aldobrandino Palermini

supporting

Also known as Aldobrandino

Aldobrandino belongs to the well-born society of Ravenna whose feasts and hunts frame the world Nastagio flees and returns to. His generous table is the kind of ordinary civility against which Boccaccio sets the supernatural terror of the pinewood and the harsh lesson it teaches about love and cruelty. He matters because the story's early movement — from city dinner to forest vision — depends on the social world he represents.

King Agilulf

major

Also known as Agilulf

Agilulf rules as a shrewd and self-possessed sovereign whose court is a stage for the ambitions and appetites of those beneath him. When a servant dares to impersonate him in the dark, the king's response is neither rage nor public scandal but a patient, surgical investigation that reveals his character as much as the culprit's. His measured handling of the affair anchors one of the collection's sharpest early studies of power, discretion, and the dangers of intimacy with a master.

Lydia

major

Also known as Pyrrhus, Pyrrhus Lydia

Lydia is young, high-spirited, and married to the aging, trusting Nicostratus, a mismatch that fuels her restless scheming. Her passion for the servant Pyrrhus drives her to feats of audacity that scandalize even as they astonish, and her willingness to deceive her husband in plain sight makes her one of Boccaccio's boldest portraits of female desire. Her story tests how far wit and will can bend a household's order before it breaks.

Gabriotto

major

Gabriotto moves in the world of noble households and clandestine romance, where love must be hidden from watchful families. His bond with his beloved is tender and doomed, and the abruptness of his end — collapsing in her embrace — crystallizes the fragility that shadows all the Decameron's lovers. His death shapes the story's emotional core and gives the brigata one of its starkest meditations on how quickly joy can turn to grief.

Tingoccio Mini

major

Also known as Tingoccio

Tingoccio and Meuccio are companions who share everything except the truth about their desire for the same woman, Tingoccio's gossip. Their rivalry, hidden beneath friendship, gives the tale its comic and moral charge. When Tingoccio dies and keeps his promise to return with news of the other world, the exchange becomes a wry, unsettling inquiry into sin, penance, and the small hypocrisies that survive death itself.

Pampinea

supporting

Pampinea is the practical, level-headed voice among the brigata, the one who first argues that the plague-stricken city must be left behind for the safety and sanity of the countryside. Her proposals set the rules of the retreat — governance, order, and the daily round of tales — and her own stories often carry a moral edge. She matters because the entire architecture of the book depends on her initiative and her steadying presence.

Fra Rinaldo

major

Also known as Rinaldo, our Fra Rinaldo, Quoth Fra Rinaldo

Rinaldo is a well-spoken cleric who, robbed on the road, takes shelter with a lady whose noble lover has failed to appear — and is only too glad to fill the vacancy. His charm and quick tongue make him welcome at her fire, but the same ease that wins her bed leaves him naked and desperate when the husband arrives. His story sets the tone for the Decameron's running joke: wit and appetite outrunning the vows meant to restrain them.

Zeppa di Mino

major

Also known as Zeppa

Zeppa and Spinelloccio are the closest of neighbors and friends, which makes the discovery of Spinelloccio's affair with Zeppa's wife cut twice as deep. Rather than rage, Zeppa stages a counter-deception that leaves his friend trapped in a chest and forced to negotiate. The result — a household where the two couples share everything, wives included — is one of the Decameron's most audacious arguments that cleverness, not vengeance, settles scores.

Messer Fortarrigo

major

Also known as Fortarrigo

Fortarrigo is the kind of man whose charm is inseparable from his ruin — a gambler who can talk his way into a cousin's purse and then out of his shirt. His compulsion to wager whatever is in reach, including what belongs to others, drives the story's central betrayal. He matters because he shows how the Decameron's tricksters are not always lovable: sometimes the wit runs one way and the cost runs the other.

Pamfilo

supporting

Pamfilo is a member of the Florentine company that flees the plague for the countryside, and his voice in the frame is steady, courteous, and fond of stories where desire finds a way. He tells the tale of Federigo degli Alberighi and his falcon — a story about love that costs everything and is finally recognized. His presence helps balance the brigata's moods, giving the days a romantic counterweight to Dioneo's bawdry.

Anichino

major

Anichino serves in the household of a man he respects, but his heart has fixed on the lady of the house, and the closeness of daily service makes the temptation constant. When the affair is discovered, the master's reaction — and Anichino's resourcefulness — determine whether the household collapses or absorbs the scandal. His story belongs to the Decameron's long argument that love among servants and nobles obeys the same rules and the same risks.

Dioneo

supporting

Also known as Quoth Dioneo, Quoth

Dioneo is the youngest-feeling of the ten storytellers, a man who negotiates a special privilege: he need not follow the queen's theme and always tells the day's final tale. That license lets him push the Decameron's humor furthest — toward cuckoldry, appetite, and the body — while the others keep to love and fortune. He matters because he is the book's pressure valve, the voice that insists pleasure and laughter belong in any honest account of human life.

Arriguccio Berlinghieri

major

Also known as Arriguccio

Arriguccio belongs to that anxious class of prosperous merchants who measure honor in appearances and guard their wives like warehouses. Convinced of his own shrewdness, he watches, tests, and schemes, only to find his certainty turned against him by a wife quicker than his suspicions. His humiliation matters because it exposes how easily male authority collapses when cleverness meets desire, a recurring joke and warning throughout the Decameron's middle days.

Giacomino da Pavia

supporting

Also known as Giacomino

Giacomino inherits not wealth but a ten-year-old girl and a soldier's dying trust, and he carries both back to a Faenza finally at peace. His quiet, paternal care for the girl makes him the pivot on which two hot-blooded suitors, Giannole and Minghino, plot their competing schemes. He matters because his household becomes the stage where love, class, and mistaken identity collide, forcing the city to sort out who this girl truly is.

Messer Ruggieri de' Figiovanni

supporting

Also known as Messer Ruggieri, Ruggieri

Messer Ruggieri moves through Florentine society as a man of standing whose dignity is his chief possession. When a jealous husband's scheming places him in a compromising position, his honor—not his desire—becomes the battleground, and the story turns on whether wit can rescue reputation. His predicament matters because it dramatizes the Decameron's fascination with how easily a gentleman's name can be made or unmade by another man's malice.

Constantine

major

Constantine is a wealthy young man of Ravenna whose obsessive pursuit of an unyielding lady exhausts both his fortune and his friends' patience. Sent away to forget her, he camps near Chiassi and wanders into a pinewood, where a terrifying apparition of hunted lovers confronts him with the cost of cruelty in love. His story matters because it turns private heartbreak into a moral spectacle, teaching the Decameron's listeners that disdain itself can be punished.

Bernabo Lomellini

major

Also known as Bernabo, meseemeth Bernabo

Bernabo is a man of trade and confidence, the kind who stakes his honor on a claim about his wife as casually as on a cargo. When a rival takes his bet and manufactures false proof of her infidelity, Bernabo's certainty curdles into rage and violence, setting in motion a chain of disguises, accusations, and reversals. His story matters because it asks how much a husband's pride is worth when the truth finally surfaces, and who pays the price for his vanity.

Tancred

major

Tancred rules Salerno with the easy authority of a man who believes his household mirrors his will. His tenderness for his daughter Ghismonda curdles into jealous surveillance, and when he catches her with a lover of lesser birth, his fury produces one of the Decameron's most gruesome acts of vengeance. He matters because his story forces readers to weigh paternal love against tyrannical control, and to see how a heart delivered in a goblet can indict a father more than a daughter.

Buffalmacco

supporting

Also known as Quoth Buffalmacco, Meanwhile Buffalmacco

Buffalmacco belongs to that trio of painters — with Bruno and the hapless Calandrino — whose practical jokes give the Decameron some of its loudest laughter. Where Bruno schemes, Buffalmacco executes with a straight face, and their friendship is really a shared appetite for watching a simple man believe the absurd. He matters because his tricks turn the collection's comic cruelty into a mirror: the clever feast, the credulous pay, and the reader is invited to laugh along.

Guiscardo

major

Guiscardo is a household servant in the court of the Prince of Salerno, invisible to the great until Ghismonda, the prince's widowed daughter, chooses him above every noble suitor. Their love is conducted in secret and in defiance of rank, and its danger lies precisely in that defiance — a prince's pride is not easily reconciled to a servant's embrace. He matters because his story forces the Decameron's listeners to weigh virtue against birth, and to feel how brutally a father's honor can answer a daughter's desire.

Messer Geri Spina

supporting

Also known as Spina, Messer Geri

Messer Geri Spina moves among the city's elite, a man of wealth and consequence whose favor is worth courting and whose displeasure is worth fearing. His story turns on a crane, a cook's quick tongue, and the thin line between a lord's amusement and his wrath. He matters because his willingness to laugh at a clever answer reveals the Decameron's recurring bargain: wit can save a man's skin, provided the powerful man is in the mood to be entertained.

Simona

major

Also known as Paul, Pasquino, Stramba, Atticciato, Malagevole, Guccio Imbratta, Guccio

Simona is a working girl of Florence, in love with Pasquino and careless enough to meet him in a garden with only a friend for cover. When he dies mid-caress after rubbing his teeth with a sage leaf, she is seized, accused of poison, and hauled before a judge while the true culprit — a toad lurking in the bush — goes unnoticed. Her ordeal matters because it shows how swiftly ordinary love can be twisted into crime, and how the Decameron's women must navigate suspicion as well as desire.

Giosefo

supporting

Giosefo is a wealthy Jew of Paris, pressed by a Christian friend to convert and shrewd enough to demand a trial first: let him go to Rome and see the heads of the Church for himself. What he witnesses there — corruption so flagrant it should have destroyed the faith — instead convinces him that a religion so abused yet still standing must be divinely upheld. He matters because his story turns satire into paradox, letting the Decameron mock the clergy while making a convert of its most clear-eyed observer.

Puccio di Rinieri

major

Also known as Rinieri, this Rinieri

Rinieri comes home to Florence full of philosophy and hungry for honor, and promptly falls for Elena, a haughty young widow who reads his longing as a trophy. Believing himself the pursuer, he is in fact the pursued — she strings him along with promises and errands while keeping her real lover close. He matters because his humiliation is the Decameron's sharpest lesson on love's blindness: the man who has studied everything has never studied the woman in front of him.

Spinelloccio Tanena

supporting

Also known as Spinelloccio

Spinelloccio carries on an affair with the wife of his closest friend, Zeppa, believing the deception safe until Zeppa catches him hidden in a chest and feels the truth over his own head. Caught between shame and the bonds of long friendship, he proposes an outrageous settlement: since nothing else is shared between them, let the wives be held in common too. His willingness to convert betrayal into a pact of shared households gives the brigata one of its most cheerfully cynical tales about friendship, appetite, and the strange arithmetic of honor.

Messer Egano de' Gulluzzi

major

Also known as Egano

Messer Egano is a wealthy, good-natured gentleman of Florence whose chief flaw is a complacent trust in his beautiful wife and in the young man he treats as a friend. While he obediently follows his wife's instructions into the forest to test a supposed rival, the lover slips into his house and his bed, and Egano returns only to be thrashed by his own servants for disturbing the household. His credulity and the wife's cool ingenuity make him the pivot of a tale about how easily authority is outmaneuvered by desire and wit.

Ninetta

supporting

Ninetta moves among the wealthy young lovers of Candia, entangled with Folco and Ughetto in a circle of secret passion and rivalry. When jealousy overwhelms her, she commits an act that brings the Duke of Crete's justice down upon her, and she faces the fire with no defense but the devotion of her sister Maddalena. Her fate turns the brigata's attention to how love, when poisoned by suspicion, can destroy the very people it claims to serve.

Gianni di Procida

major

Also known as Gianni, Procida

Gianni di Severino is one of two young men of comparable birth and fortune who both burn for the same fifteen-year-old girl raised by Giacomino, and neither can obtain her honorably because their kinsmen refuse the match. He bribes the servant Crivello to smuggle him into the house when Giacomino dines out, unaware that his rival Minghino has made a parallel arrangement with the maid. His scheme collides with Minghino's on the same night, and the resulting chaos exposes the girl's hidden parentage and forces the whole city to reckon with questions of blood, honor, and who truly deserves to marry.

Mistress Belcolore

major

Also known as Belcolore

Belcolore is a peasant woman whose beauty and self-possession make her the target of a local priest's persistent and clumsy advances. Rather than submit or make a scene, she plays along just far enough to extract payment and then arranges matters so that the priest is publicly humiliated and she keeps what she has gained. Her cool-headed manipulation of male desire and clerical hypocrisy gives the brigata one of its sharpest pictures of how wit, not virtue alone, protects a woman's interests in a world where both church and neighbor feel entitled to her body.

Messer Gentile de' Carisendi

major

Also known as Messer Gentile, Messer Gentile Carisendi, Gentile

Messer Gentile is a distinguished gentleman of Bologna who has long loved a lady now married to another man, and whose generosity of spirit matches his rank. When he discovers her body laid out as dead, he takes her to his home, where she revives, and he tends her with a devotion that could easily become possession. His decision to restore her to her husband rather than keep her for himself makes him the brigata's model of a love that gives rather than takes, and his story tests whether noble feeling can survive the opportunity to satisfy it.

Gabriel

supporting

Also known as the Angel Gabriel, Angel Gabriel

The archangel whose name a corrupt friar steals to slip into a Venetian woman's bed, trading heaven's authority for earthly appetite.

Filostrato

supporting

Filostrato belongs to the brigata of ten young Florentines who flee plague-stricken Florence for the countryside and pass the days in tale-telling. Where his companions often turn to wit and happy endings, he steers toward love's crueler bargains, and his very name suggests one vanquished by it. His choice of theme sets the emotional register for a day of the Decameron, giving the collection its darker counterweight to laughter.

Madam Sismonda

major

Also known as Sismonda

Left waiting for the Marquis Azzo, who is called away before supper, Madam Sismonda finds a half-frozen Rinaldo d'Asti at her door and decides fortune has sent her a substitute. She clothes him in her dead husband's suit, warms him in the Marquis's bath, and then makes her case to him with frank, disarming candor. Her willingness to seize what chance provides, without shame or apology, makes her one of the Decameron's most memorable arguments for women's initiative.

Messer Currado

major

Also known as Currado

Messer Currado, out hawking on his island with his lady and servants, discovers Madam Beritola living half-feral among goats and recognizes in her story a grief he cannot leave alone. He weeps for her misfortune, offers her his sister's place in his house, and patiently persuades her to leave the cave when she would rather stay. His generosity sets in motion the slow restoration of a family scattered by shipwreck and slavery, making him the quiet hinge of one of the book's longest arcs.

Il Zima

major

Also known as Zima

Il Zima moves in the world of Florentine gallantry, where desire must be negotiated through wit rather than force. His story, framed by Filostrato's meditation on how love rewards the bold in gentle hearts, turns on a single clever address to a husband that transforms rivalry into permission. He matters because he embodies the Decameron's faith that eloquence, not fortune alone, can deliver what a lover wants.

Andrevuola

major

Andrevuola arrives in Naples to buy horses and promptly falls for a stranger's tale that he is her long-lost brother, following her to a house in the ill-named Malpertugio quarter. His vanity, his provincial trust, and his readiness to believe himself loved make him the perfect mark for a practiced con. His misadventure opens the Decameron's great sequence on the tricks fortune and clever women play on the self-satisfied.

Peronella

major

Also known as Quoth Peronella

Peronella belongs to the bustling world of Boccaccio's Naples, where cleverness counts for more than virtue and a poor household is no obstacle to appetite. Caught between a dull husband and a resourceful lover, she improvises a story so seamless that the cuckolded man carries the barrel away on his own back, delighted with his bargain. Her tale is one of the Decameron's sharpest comedies of female ingenuity, showing how wit can outrun both law and shame.

Primasso

major

Primasso is a man of formidable learning and equally formidable appetite, admired everywhere except at his own dinner table, since fame does not fill an empty stomach. When he arrives unannounced at the abbot's house, the abbot's stinginess collides with his own reputation for hospitality, and the standoff becomes a quiet duel of wits. The story turns on whether a host's vanity can be made to serve a guest's hunger, making Primasso a comic emblem of how cleverness feeds itself.

Giannotto

major

Also known as Quoth Giannotto

Giannotto grows up in servitude under a false name, quick-witted and restless, unwilling to accept the menial lot assigned to him. He leaves Genoa to seek his fortune, takes service with Currado Malespina, and finds himself near a woman whose past is bound up with his own in ways neither yet suspects. His story is one of the Decameron's great long arcs of recognition and reversal, where patience, disguise, and a good eye for opportunity slowly turn the wheel of fortune.

Sicurano da Finale

major

Also known as Sicurano

Sicurano da Finale is a figure of extraordinary resourcefulness, a woman whose male identity carries her from obscurity to a position of trust in a foreign court. Her competence and loyalty win her authority that no one suspects is borrowed, and her story becomes a study in how identity, honor, and love survive when everything else is stripped away. She matters because her long arc of concealment and eventual recognition embodies the Decameron's fascination with fortune's reversals and the resilience of the clever.

Fra Puccio

major

Fra Puccio is a man of genuine piety and almost total gullibility, convinced that elaborate devotions will secure his salvation. His wife, weary of his austerities and drawn to a livelier companion, conspires to turn his faith into a convenient alibi, sending him into the garden for penances while she entertains indoors. His tale is one of the Decameron's most famous comedies of religious hypocrisy, where the joke lands not on faith itself but on the vanity of a man who mistakes performance for virtue.

Niccolosa

supporting

Niccolosa is a daughter in a country inn, caught between a persistent young Florentine and a household that would rather not see what happens under its roof. When Pinuccio's nocturnal visit is nearly exposed, her mother's quick invention of a dream saves everyone's reputation, and Niccolosa learns that silence can be a kind of inheritance. She matters as the still center of a farce about desire, hospitality, and the stories families tell to keep the peace.

Fiammetta

supporting

Also known as Madonna Fiammetta

A quick-witted noblewoman among the ten storytellers, she turns passion into argument, urging women to grant their favors with judgment rather than let fortune choose for them.

Ghismonda

major

A widowed princess of Salerno who chooses her own lover beneath her station, then defends that choice with a composure her father's rage cannot shake.

Messer Filippo Argenti

minor

Also known as Messer Filippo

A Florentine nobleman known for his bad temper and later mocked by Dante.