Giovanni Guasconti, a young man, comes to Padua, a city in northern Italy, from somewhere to the south, in order to attend college at the University of Padua. He finds a place to stay in a very old building which might have, at some point in its earlier and more well-kept days, been the palace of the local noble family whose coat of arms is painted above the entrance. Giovanni recalls a story about this same family: that one of the ancestors was somehow associated with Dante and the Inferno. This association does not bode well for the fate of either Giovanni or the other people in the home: Doctor Rappaccini and his daughter, the beautiful but deadly Beatrice.

Giovanni soon meets Signor Pietro Baglioni, a medical professor at the university and long-time friend of Giovanni's father, and Giovanni brings to the a well-known doctor a letter of introduction. Professor Baglioni seems like an agreeable enough person, but when Giovanni asks him about Doctor Rappaccini, assuming that there must be some camaraderie among professionals in the same field, Baglioni expresses an intense dislike of Rappaccini. Though Baglioni admits that Rappaccini is incredibly smart and capable, he also claims that Rappaccini cares much more about science than he does about people.