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Updated: May 18, 2025
The opera opens with a brilliant festival in the gardens of the Barberigo Palace, which is attended by Genarro, Orsini, and others, all of them cordial haters of the detestable Borgias. As they leave, Lucrezia approaches, masked, in a gondola, and is received by Gubetta, with whom she has come to Venice on some secret errand. He begs her to reveal her name, but she refuses.
That is what it has come to. Once upon a time an Orsini quarrelled with a Colonna in the Corso, just where Aragno's café is now situated, and ran him through with his rapier, wounding him almost to death. He was carried into the palace of the Theodoli, close by, and the records of that family tell that within the hour eight hundred of the Colonna's retainers were in the house to guard him.
The bold Pucci repeated his opinion in the same letter, saying, "She is the child of the Pope, the niece of the cardinal, and the putative daughter of Signor Orsini, to whom our Master intends to give three or four more castles near Bassanello.
This he asserts with an air of truth that commands belief; he told the same tale to Cardinal Orsini, and to many more, and to all in the very same words, so that I think this is no fib of his. What more do you want? This statement of his, and his serious countenance, cause me to give some credence to him.
His father was employed at first as a butler and then as a steward by the Colonna, married an illegitimate daughter of the family, and lived to see his granddaughter, Maria Mancini, married to the head of the house, and his son a cardinal and despot of France, and himself, after the death of his first wife, the honoured husband of Porzia Orsini, so that he was the only man in history who was married both to an Orsini and to a Colonna.
Matters went forward as Alexander had wished, and before the end of the year the pontifical army had, seized a great number of castles and fortresses that belonged to the Orsini, who thought themselves already lost when Charles VIII came to the rescue.
He foresaw that they would employ arguments to induce Valentinois into an enterprise of which all the cost would be his, and all the possible profit their own. The duke would certainly have obeyed and avoided Tuscany, but that precisely as the shrewd Pope had feared Vitelli and Orsini implored him to march through Florentine territory.
Alexander had induced this kinswoman of his to leave the Orsini palace and to take up her abode with Lucretia in the palace of S. Maria in Portico, where we shall frequently see them and another woman who was only too close to the Pope. Vannozza remained in her own house in the Regola quarter.
Now, as the transaction is unknown to her husband, and as I am well assured that the Marquis of Orsini is really on most excellent terms with her ladyship moreover, as this same marquis did pay a certain heavy gambling debt within an hour after the diamonds were pledged to you it requires but little ingenuity to put all these circumstances together, to arrive at the result which I have mentioned.
There was no cause to delay the matter longer. He had word from Rome of the capture of Cardinal Orsini, of Gianbattista da Virginio, of Giacomo di Santacroce, and Rinaldo Orsini, Archbishop of Florence.
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