Simona and Pasquino
Intro
- Storyteller: Emilia
- Emilia reminds the group that Love also makes some pretty awesome displays among the poor.
- To prove this, she'll tell a story set in Florence.
Story
- A young and beautiful woman called Simona falls in love with a man named Pasquino, who's as poor as she is. Pretty soon, the couple found ways to, um, indulge themselves.
- Pasquino convinces Simona to meet him in a particular garden so that they can have more privacy for their fun.
- Simona agrees and brings her friend Lagina with her. Turns out that Pasquino brings a friend (called Stramba) too, so it's a double date.
- Pasquino and Simona find a cozy little nook by a huge clump of sage and get down to business.
- Sometime later, while engaging in random pillow talk, Pasquino plucks some of the sage leaves and begins to clean his teeth and gums.
- Almost immediately, he falls ill and dies.
- Simona yells for her friends. By the time Lagina and Stramba get there, Pasquino is looking pretty harsh—black and blue and swollen all over.
- Stramba immediately accuses Simona of poisoning Pasquino and has her dragged off to the judge.
- But the judge can't believe that a sweet thing like Simona could be a murderer, so he takes her back to the scene so that she can show him exactly what happened.
- Pasquino's body is still there, swollen and putrid on the ground. So Simona goes to the clump of sage, plucks some leaves and...yes, she does. She rubs her gums with the sage.
- Simona falls down dead in front of the entire crowd.
- At this point, Emilia goes into spasms of joy that Simona has the good luck to die like this. For one thing, she gets to be with her lover in the afterlife. For another, her innocence is preserved.
- Back to the story: the judge is appalled by the death of Simona. He orders the sage to be pulled up at the roots.
- Guess what they find there? A large venomous toad. Clearly, this is what killed the lovers. (Shmoop's Chief Botanical Poison Correspondent can't vouch for the scientific authenticity of this conclusion.)
- In the end, the swollen bodies of the two unhappy lovers are picked up and buried together.