[The Life of Cesare Borgia by Raphael Sabatini]@TWC D-Link book
The Life of Cesare Borgia

CHAPTER II
17/22

She is also known to have been the proprietor of an inn--the Albergo del Leone--in Via del Orso, opposite the Torre di Nona, for she figures with della Croce in a contract regarding a lease of it in 1483.
With her entrance into second nuptials, her relations with Cardinal Roderigo came to an end, and his two children by her, then in Rome--Lucrezia and Giuffredo--went to take up their residence with Adriana Orsini (nee de Mila) at the Orsini Palace on Monte Giordano.

She was a cousin of Roderigo's, and the widow of Lodovico Orsini, by whom she had a son, Orso Orsini, who from early youth had been betrothed to Giulia Farnese, the daughter of a patrician family, still comparatively obscure, but destined through this very girl to rise to conspicuous eminence.
For her surpassing beauty this Giulia Farnese has been surnamed La Bella--and as Giulia La Bella was she known in her day--and she has been immortalized by Pinturicchio and Guglielmo della Porta.

She sat to the former as a model for his Madonna in the Borgia Tower of the Vatican, and to the latter for the statue of Truth which adorns the tomb of her brother Alessandro Farnese, who became Pope Paul III.
Here in Adriana Orsini's house, where his daughter Lucrezia was being educated, Cardinal Roderigo, now at the mature age of some six-and-fifty years, made the acquaintance and became enamoured of this beautiful golden-headed Giulia, some forty years his junior.

To the fact that she presently became his mistress--somewhere about the same time that she became Orso Orsini's wife--is due the sudden rise of the House of Farnese.

This began with her handsome, dissolute brother Alessandro's elevation to the purple by her lover, and grew to vast proportions during his subsequent and eminently scandalous occupation of the Papal Throne as Paul III.
In the year 1490 Lucrezia was the only one of Roderigo's children by Vannozza who remained in Rome.
Giovanni Borgia was in Spain, whither he had gone on the death of his brother Pedro Luis, to take posession of the Duchy of Gandia, which the power of his father's wealth and vast influence at the Valencian Court had obtained for that same Pedro Luis.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books