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Attached to Ca' Alvisi, on the land side, is a somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in comfortable guise, at the service of her friends.
He is generally assumed to have been a Spaniard, and is commonly designated as Michelotto, or Don Miguel; but Alvisi supposes him, from his name of Corella, to have been a Venetian, and he tells us that by his fidelity to Cesare and the implicit manner in which he executed his master's orders, he earned as is notorious considerable hatred.
1 Quoted by Alvisi, on the authority of a letter of Luigi da Porto, March 16, 1510, in Lettere Storiche. This challenge was never taken up. Amongst other loyal ones was that fine soldier of fortune, Taddeo della Volpe, who, in his Florentine prison, refused all offers to enter the service of the Signory until he had learnt that his lord was gone from Italy.
The most generous of hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no more it had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and the long, pleased procession the charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, the reluctant departures that made Ca' Alvisi, as was currently said, a social <i>porto di mare</i> is, for remembrance and regret, already a possession of ghosts; so that, on the spot, at present, the attention ruefully averts itself from the dear little old faded but once familiarly bright facade, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar uses that are doing their best to "paint out" in Venice, right and left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the immemorial note of distinction.
Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church of S. Maria della Salute so directly that from the balcony over the water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole of the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the genial <i>padrona</i> as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and sympathy.
For it is eminently probable as Alvisi opines that it was Gherardi who urged his master to make an alliance with the Colonna, Gherardi himself being related to that powerful family. The alliance of these old enemies Colonna and Borgia was in their common interests, that they might stand against their common enemy, Orsini the old friends of the Borgias.
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