[[Listen]]
Fiora, Fiora! È silenzio.
Then, desperately, he throws himself beside her and presses his lips on hers. A sudden chill, as of approaching death, passes through him. He rises, takes a few tottering steps toward the exit.
Like a shadow, Manfredo approaches. He has come to seize his wife's lover, whose name his father could not wring from her, but whom at last they have caught. He recognizes Avito. Then it was he whom she adored.
"What do you want?" asks Avito. "Can you not see that I can scarcely speak?"
Scarcely speak? He might as well be dead. Upon Fiora's lips Archibaldo has spread a virulent poison, knowing well that her lover would come into the crypt to kiss her, and in that very act would drain the poison from her lips and die. Thus would they track him.
With his last breath, Avito tells that she loved him as the life that they took from her, aye, even more. Despite the avowal, Manfredo cannot hate him; but rather is he moved to wonder at the vast love Fiora was capable of bestowing, yet not upon himself.
Avito is dead. Manfredo, too, throws himself upon Fiora's corpse, and from her lips draws in what remains of the poison, quivers, while death slowly creeps through his veins, then enters eternal darkness, as Archibaldo gropes his way into the crypt.