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Updated: June 19, 2025
A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown for Ippolita this windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.
He was at that hour most happily unhappy over the late disappearance of his Glorious Lady. The peerless beauty of Padua, the incomparable Ippolita, was gone. His business was to devise dirges, monodies, laments, descortz in the Provençal manner; to cry "Heigho!" and "Well-a-day!" not "Ban!" or "Out, haro!"
A pair of ragged breeches, swathes of cloth on her legs, an old shirt, a cloak of patched clouts, shapeless hat of felt, sandals for her feet, shod staff for her hand behold the peerless Ippolita, idol of half Padua, turned into a sheepish overgrown boy in tatters, whose bathing could only have been in sweat, and the scent of his garments the rankness of goats.
Giulia Gonzaga Colonna, Ippolita Sforza married to a Bentivoglio, Bianca Rangona, Cecilia Gallerana, Camilla Scarampa, and others, were either altogether irreproachable, or their social fame threw into the shade whatever they may have done amiss.
Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet eyes to those who watched.
That evening in his fellowship, Meleagro and Stazio, cloaked and lurking under the arcades, saw Ippolita walk down the Via Pozzo Depinto arm in arm with two shawled friends, transparently in the ranks of the popol basso, but as obviously not of them. Her golden head was bare; also by a head she sailed above them.
The Jew, who, by the look of him, had earned more money an hour after death than in all the years of his life, was put a foot and a half underground among the pumpkins in a garden of the Via di Vanzo. Padua went to sleep. "Sagro cuor di Gesù!" thought poor Ippolita, "what a way to undo me!" But aloud she only murmured, "Tante grazie, gentildonne," and got out of bed.
Lanterns were little use save to reveal the cut-throat blackness all about. Now, on the very night when Matteo was fuddled, Ippolita in tears, Alessandro in a fever, and the more reputable Padovani turning down their beds, the watch came rattling at the Sub-Prefect's door to report a dead Jew in the Via della Gatta.
She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but "Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to her bowing gaolers. As the swaying litter of gold and white went out into the Pozzo Depinto and turned up towards the Pontecorbo Gate; as the music and chanting "Candida Ippolita, premio d'Amore!
If it can be done it shall be done." "Ah," sighed Ippolita, with a hand on her heart, "ah, but it cannot be done!" "Then why speak of it?" "Because I want so much to do it. Listen." Then Ippolita, clinging to her friend's neck, whispered her darling thought. The goatherds on the hills! There was freedom clean, untrammelled freedom!
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