# The Decameron — Character guide

> Key figures in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

- [Calandrino](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/calandrino.md): 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 
- [Andreuccio di Pietro](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/andreuccio.md): 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 e
- [Messer Torello d'Istria](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/messer_torello.md): 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
- [Tedaldo Elisei](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/tedaldo_elisei.md): 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 d
- [Bruno](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/bruno.md): 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 
- [Ricciardo Minutolo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ricciardo_minutolo.md): 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 affa
- [Gisippus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/gisippus.md): 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
- [Cimon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/cimon.md): 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 Iph
- [Titus Quintius Fulvus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/titus_quintius_fulvus.md): 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 friend
- [Master Ciappelletto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/master_ciappelletto.md): 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
- [Alessandro Chiarmontesi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/alessandro.md): 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 sh
- [Nathan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/nathan.md): 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
- [Rinaldo d'Asti](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/rinaldo_dasti.md): 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](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/mithridanes.md): A wealthy young man whose envy of a famously generous rival curdles into a murderous scheme to outdo him in liberality.
- [Fra Alberto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/fra_alberto.md): 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 he
- [Nicostratus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/nicostratus.md): An aging Argive nobleman whose young wife Lydia, tired of his years, schemes to bed his trusted servant Pyrrhus right under his nose.
- [Martellino](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/martellino.md): 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](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/catella.md): A jealous Florentine wife whose suspicion of her husband is turned against her by a friend's cruel, elaborate practical joke.
- [Gualtieri](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/gualtieri.md): 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 escalatin
- [Nastagio degli Onesti](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/nastagio_degli_onesti.md): 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 lovesi
- [Ferondo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ferondo.md): 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 after
- [Masetto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/masetto.md): 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 co
- [Landolfo Ruffolo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/landolfo_ruffolo.md): 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,
- [Salabaetto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/salabaetto.md): 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
- [Master Simone](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/master_simone.md): 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 a
- [Saladin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/saladin.md): 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 discl
- [Ruggieri da Jeroli](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ruggieri.md): 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 i
- [Federigo degli Alberighi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/federigo_degli_alberighi.md): 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 co
- [Messer Angiolieri](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/messer_angiolieri.md): 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 watchfu
- [Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/messer_ricciardo_di_chinzica.md): 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 ab
- [Lauretta](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/lauretta.md): 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 d
- [Sophronia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/sophronia.md): 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 make
- [Madam Beritola Caracciola](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/madam_beritola.md): 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 
- [Ghino di Tacco](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ghino_di_tacco.md): 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
- [Currado Malespina](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/currado_malespina.md): 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 h
- [Ambrogiuolo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ambrogiuolo.md): 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
- [Aldobrandino Palermini](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/aldobrandino_palermini.md): 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 supernat
- [King Agilulf](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/king_agilulf.md): 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
- [Lydia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/lydia.md): 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
- [Gabriotto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/gabriotto.md): 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 he
- [Tingoccio Mini](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/tingoccio_mini.md): 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. W
- [Pampinea](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/pampinea.md): 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
- [Fra Rinaldo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/fra_rinaldo.md): 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 fir
- [Zeppa di Mino](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/zeppa_di_mino.md): 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 
- [Messer Fortarrigo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/messer_fortarrigo.md): 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 belong
- [Pamfilo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/pamfilo.md): 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 
- [Anichino](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/anichino.md): 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 react
- [Dioneo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/dioneo.md): 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 hum
- [Arriguccio Berlinghieri](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/arriguccio_berlinghieri.md): 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 c
- [Giacomino da Pavia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/giacomino_da_pavia.md): 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
- [Messer Ruggieri de' Figiovanni](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/messer_ruggieri.md): 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 b
- [Constantine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/constantine.md): 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,
- [Bernabo Lomellini](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/bernabo_lomellini.md): 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 
- [Tancred](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/tancred.md): 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 les
- [Buffalmacco](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/buffalmacco.md): 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
- [Guiscardo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/guiscardo.md): 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 i
- [Messer Geri Spina](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/spina.md): 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 b
- [Simona](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/paul_simona_pasquino.md): 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, accus
- [Giosefo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/giosefo.md): 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 
- [Puccio di Rinieri](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/puccio_di_rinieri.md): 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 — sh
- [Spinelloccio Tanena](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/spinelloccio_tanena.md): 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 bon
- [Messer Egano de' Gulluzzi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/egano.md): 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 i
- [Ninetta](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ninetta.md): 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
- [Gianni di Procida](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/gianni_di_procida.md): 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
- [Mistress Belcolore](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/mistress_belcolore.md): 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
- [Messer Gentile de' Carisendi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/messer_gentile.md): 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 h
- [Gabriel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/gabriel.md): The archangel whose name a corrupt friar steals to slip into a Venetian woman's bed, trading heaven's authority for earthly appetite.
- [Filostrato](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/filostrato.md): 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 towa
- [Madam Sismonda](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/madam_sismonda.md): 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
- [Messer Currado](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/currado.md): 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 
- [Il Zima](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/il_zima.md): 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 si
- [Andrevuola](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/andrevuola.md): 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 h
- [Peronella](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/peronella.md): 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 impr
- [Primasso](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/primasso.md): 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, th
- [Giannotto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/giannotto.md): 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 hims
- [Sicurano da Finale](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/sicurano_da_finale.md): 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 
- [Fra Puccio](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/fra_puccio.md): 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
- [Niccolosa](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/niccolosa.md): 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'
- [Fiammetta](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/fiammetta.md): 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](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/ghismonda.md): 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.

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