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Updated: June 28, 2025
In that same month of August, when Galeazzo sent her the last-named letter from his villa at Castelnuovo, near Tortona, the Marchesana wrote to the Mantuan ambassador at Venice, desiring him to send her all the poems and romances concerning French paladins at the court of Charlemagne which he could discover.
The sight of these precious and varied treasures were fully appreciated by the cultivated Duchess Leonora, who had grown up among the scholars of her royal father's academy at Naples, and by her daughter, the accomplished Marchesana Isabella, ever eager, as she says in one of her letters, to see and learn some new thing, "desiderosa di cosa nova."
After which characteristic expression, the Marchesana proceeds to tell her lord that the date of her departure for Genoa has been fixed for the last day of September, and to describe her brother-in-law's preparations for the visit. Before her departure, he made a splendid present, which she describes in a letter written on the 20th of September.
Andrea Cossa had already brought me the other four, for which I thank you exceedingly; but I feel that, under the circumstances, I ought not to keep them. As it is, I have great pleasure in seeing them all together, and now your Highness can give them back to the Marchesana."
"He greatly loved the Marchesana of Pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in love, and was in return passionately beloved of her; and he still keeps many of her letters, which are full of most honest and tenderest love, such as used to issue from a heart like hers; and he himself had written her many and many a sonnet full of wit and tenderness.
On the 15th, the Marchesana reached Pavia, where both the Duchesses of Milan and Bari rode out to meet her, and placing her between them, after many embraces, conducted her through the city. Here the two dukes and all the ambassadors were awaiting her, and a troop of trumpeters and outriders escorted the party up to the castle gates.
And again a few days later, when the festivities were ended and the ducal family were enjoying a little rest before the party broke up, he writes "Whenever Lodovico Sforza is wanted, he is always to be found in the company of his wife, of the Marchesana, of Don Alfonso and Madonna Anna, with whom he is never tired of talking and laughing, exactly as if he were a youth of their own age."
At Christmas-time, in the last days of 1491, the impatient Marchesana had written to remind him that she had never yet received the eclogue which he had promised to send her at her brother Alfonso's wedding, and refused to be put off with any other verses, saying that his poems pleased her more than those of any living bard.
One of the ladies of her suite, the Marchesana of Cotrone, wrote the duke, saying, "The bride is not especially handsome, but she has an animated face, and in spite of her having such a large number of ladies with her, and notwithstanding the presence of the illustrious lady of Urbino, who is very beautiful, and who clearly shows that she is your Excellency's sister, my illustrious mistress Isabella, according to our opinion and of those who came with the Duchess of Ferrara, is the most beautiful of all.
This letter was written by Galeazzo on the 13th of April, after which the subject dropped for a while, until it was revived by a visit which his brother, Gaspare Fracassa, paid to Mantua in the summer with his wife, Margherita Pia, a great friend of the Marchesana and Duchess of Urbino.
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