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At the beginning of the campaign, fortune seemed to favor the Florentines; for Count Carlo made rapid advances in the Perugino, and Niccolo Vitelli, though unable to enter Castello, was superior in the field, and plundered the surrounding country without opposition. The forces also, at Poggibonzi, constantly overran the country up to the walls of Sienna.
"Stay, noble Orsini," said Stefanello. "The insult offered to thee is my quarrel mine was the deed and against me speaks this degenerate scion of our line. Adrian di Castello sometime called Colonna surrender your sword: you are my prisoner!" "Oh!" said Adrian, grinding his teeth, "that my ancestral blood did not flow through thy veins else but enough!
"In the year 1492," writes the chronicler Cagnola, "this glorious and magnanimous prince adorned the Castello di Porta Zobia with many fair and marvellous buildings, enlarged the Piazza in front of the Castello, and removed obstructions in the streets of the city, and caused them to be painted and beautified with frescoes.
In 1507 he attended Louis XII. when he entered Milan for the second time, and was a conspicuous figure in the grand tournament that was held on the Piazza of the Castello. Once more he came back to the scene of his old triumphs, under these changed circumstances, and played a leading part in the wars that distracted the Milanese.
The husband of Pesaro's chere amie, the Marchese Vivaldi, when Cagliostro was arrested and sent to the Castello Santo Angelo at Rome, was obliged to fly his country, and went to Venice, where he was kept secreted and maintained by the Marquis Solari, and it was only through his means and those of the Cardinal Consalvi, then known only as the musical Abbe Consalvi, from his great attachment to the immortal Cimarosa, that Vivaldi was ever allowed to return to his native country; but Consalvi, who was the friend of Vivaldi, feeling with the Marquis Solari much interested for his situation, they together contrived to convince Pius VI. that he was more to be pitied than blamed, and thus obtained his recall.
It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop's palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di Corte.
And then, the Duke having resolved that the one to be put into execution should be Tribolo's, he went off to have the marble quarried at Carrara, where he also caused to be quarried the two basins for the loggie at Castello, a table, and many other blocks of marble.
He earned great riches; and he both bought and built houses in Florence, and acquired much settled property both at Perugia and at Castello della Pieve. He took a most beautiful young woman to wife, and had children by her; and he delighted so greatly in seeing her wearing beautiful head-dresses, both abroad and at home, that it is said that he would often tire her head with his own hand.
And the last thing he had heard, on the previous day, as he fled the theatre, had been the loud echoes of the latest quarrel between Mesdames Menschikov and Castello, in which the former sat alternately reviling her companion and wailing that her voice, on the morrow, would be a mere hoarse shred.
Then they laid her in a marble chest outside the church, and all departed, still with torches burning, to their homes. Now it so fell out that upon that very evening Gerardo's galley had returned from Syria, and was anchoring within the port of Lido, which looks across to the island of Castello.
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