Calandrino, the fool

It won’t be the first or the last time that Calandrino is being fooled in the Decameron. In all of the novellas in which he appears, he is depicted as an ignorant, silly and selfish person. Due to these characteristics, he is often the target of jokes and deception. His friends, Bruno and Buffalmacco, can easily fool him with their intelligence and eloquence. Ingenuity and the art of reaching goals by using rhetoric are recurring themes throughout the Decameron.

It won’t be the first or the last time that Calandrino is being fooled in the Decameron. In all of the novellas in which he appears, he is depicted as an ignorant, silly and selfish person. Due to these characteristics, he is often the target of jokes and deception. His friends, Bruno and Buffalmacco, can easily fool him with their intelligence and eloquence. Ingenuity and the art of reaching goals by using rhetoric are recurring themes throughout the Decameron.

Altogether, Calandrino appears in four tales: besides the novella discussed in this tour, we also encounter him in the third novella of the eighth day, the sixth novella of the eighth day and the fifth novella of the ninth day. The first one, called Calandrino e l’elitropia, is very famous and is part of the Decameron’s film adaptation of the Fratelli (brothers) Taviani.See Encyclopedia Britannica, “Taviani Brothers”. Calandrino is a typical antihero and becomes a recurring character in Italian literature, as we will see in the next paragraph.

The character of Calandrino has achieved great success in various media such as cinema, theater and literature.

In the movie Maraviglioso Boccaccio from the Fratelli Taviani we see how Calandrino is fooled by his friends into believing he is invisible thanks to a magical stone, the so-called ‘elitropia’.YouTube, clip by CG Entertainment, “Maraviglioso Boccaccio – Calandrino Clip”, extract from “Maraviglioso Boccaccio” dei Fratelli Taviani, uploaded 21 Sept 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wAQTENdm4EIn this novalla, Calandrino returns as an ignorant and stupid person, just like the novella in which he believes he is pregnant.

When we enter the world of art, we see Calandrino return in various works. Bernardo Dovizi has borrowed Calandrino, who is one of the central characters in his comedy called Il Calandro, from the Decameron. Based on this comedy, Giovanni Alberto Ristori composed the opera Calandro, which premiered in 1726 in the court theater at the Pillnitz Castle in Germany. Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, attended the opera during Carnaval in 1728 and became so enthusiastic that he asked for a copy of the score. When Ristori went on tour to Russia, his work became the first Italian opera to be performed there.See Julie Anne Sadie, Companion to Baroque Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), page 201.

James Joyce also refers to Calandrino in a subtle manner in his masterpiece Ulysses, using the words ‘Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child’.See James Joyce, Ulysses, (London: Edward Arnold, 1972). The British writer James Robinson points out, in his book Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory, and CommunityJames Robinson, Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), page 119., that many aspects of this novella occur in Ulysses: the marriage of Calandrino and Tessa can be compared to that of Mr. Bloom and Molly, and the mocking and vulgarity of Buffalmacco and Simone to that of Mulligan and his fellow medicals. In both stories the topic of a man giving birth recurs.