Plot, summary and moral of the 10th tale of the sixth day of the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, the one about Friar Cipolla.

Friar Onion: Plot Summary

Brother Cipolla lives in the convent of San’Antonio di Certaldo, a village near the castle of Colle Valdelsa, between Florence and Siena. A small village inhabited by nobles and wealthy men and it is among them that every year Brother Cipolla collects offerings and alms from the peasants for the convent .
Brother Cipolla is described as a short man with red hair, jovial and playful, a lover of cheerful company and, even if not educated, he was an excellent orator highly esteemed by all his acquaintances.

During a Mass in the month of August, in the parish church, he asked the faithful to remember the usual donations to the Church, to each one in the amount he could afford , but to those who brought generous alms he would show a prestigious relic: a feather from the wings of the Archangel Gabriel.
Among the faithful present at the sermon of Friar Cipolla there were also Giovanni and Biagio, two companions of the friar who decided to play a trick on him and steal the relic , taking advantage of the Friar’s departure the following day. Biagio would entertain the servant while Giovanni would have to steal the feather.   What would the Friar tell the faithful when he did not find the relic?

The friar’s servant, Guccio, who had many nicknames that emphasized his filthiness and heaviness, was a bad and inept person, described as slow, dirty, a liar, negligent and disobedient, careless, forgetful and ill-mannered. Despite this, Guccio had a high opinion of himself: he thought he was so attractive that all the women fell in love with him just by looking at him.
After leaving and arriving at the hotel, Friar Cipolla asks Guccio to watch over his things , especially the saddlebags containing the sacred objects.

But Guccio had preferred to go to the hotel kitchens in search of some servants. When he meets Nuta, a fat, large, small and poorly made woman, very buxom, sweaty, greasy and smoked, Guccio no longer understands anything and throws himself at her like a vulture on a carcass, leaving the friar’s room unattended. While Guccio courts Nuta filling her ears with words and compliments, the friar’s two friends arrive at the hotel and find Guccio busy with his courtship. It is the right moment to enter the friar’s room and here, searching, they come across a parrot feather, they are convinced that it is the relic to show to the people of Certaldo and so they exchange it for pieces of coal.

Meanwhile, the faithful of the town , having heard the news of the relic that Friar Cipolla would show to the most generous, headed towards the castle and there were so many of them that they barely got in. Having learned of the situation, the Friar sent for Guccio to bring him the saddlebags and the servant, having fulfilled his task, rang the bells. Not realizing that the saddlebags had been tampered with, he began the sermon and emphatically had two large candles lit.

But when he opened the box that was supposed to contain the pen and saw the pieces of coal instead of the relics, he didn’t think of Guccio’s involvement, he didn’t think he was capable of so much.
Faced with the unexpected, the Friar tried to stall for time: he raised his hands to the sky thanking God and began to invent something to deceive the faithful. He said he had traveled through various towns and cities in Italy, reached distant places, experienced many different situations and met many people, until he arrived in Jerusalem, where Saint Anthony showed him several relics including a finger of the Holy Spirit. To thank him for his company, he gave him some: in addition to the feather of the angel Gabriel, he gave him the sound of the bells of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem enclosed in a vial and finally some coals, remains of the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence.

Although he had had these relics for a long time – continued Friar Cipolla – his superior, the abbot, had never allowed him to show them, since their authenticity was not certain, but that day he decided to do so anyway since miracles had been attributed to them. Finally he said that he had exchanged the boxes containing the various relics because they were similar and therefore he had with him not the feather but the coals, since that was God’s will, in fact two days later it would be San Lorenzo. Friar Cipolla sang a praise to San Lorenzo together with the faithful and then showed the coals explaining that, whoever touched them, would be immune from burns for a year.

The crowd of faithful approached the friar with admiration, making increasingly higher offerings to be able to touch the relic. The friar then began to mark crosses on the foreheads of the faithful, stating that the holy coals would be reconstituted in the box. Giovanni and Biagio, who were also listening to the sermon, were amazed by the cunning with which Friar Cipolla had managed to deceive the people of Certaldo and returned the feather to him. They then went to celebrate with the rest of the town and the following year the feather brought them no less than the same offerings as the coals.