Murder in the Garden of God (38 page)

Chapter 30

After Vittoria

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne,
and books were opened. Another book was opened,
which is the book of life. The dead were judged
according to what they had done as recorded in the books.

– Revelation 20:12

V
ittoria’s tragic death had all the elements to make poets swoon with ecstasy. She had been gorgeous, ambitious, and possibly adulterous and murderous. Her story was chock full of irony – if only she had waited for Pope Gregory to die, she would have been Princess Montalto with a handsome young husband at her side, beloved by her family. Due to her acquiescence in Francesco’s death, she found herself a dubious duchess, shackled to a huge, rotting, spendthrift husband, whose family killed her for some furniture. Her end was dramatic in the extreme – a murder before a crucifix, complete with bodice-ripping, and followed by a shoddy burial in an unmarked grave.

Soon after her death, many poets wrote as if they were Vittoria, which led to the legend that Vittoria herself was a great poet. Though no contemporary records mention her poetry, it is tempting to picture the doomed beauty in the five weeks that remained to her after the duke’s death, thick black tendrils of hair curling down a frilly white nightgown, as she penned sad verses by the light of a single candle. Numerous poems attributed to her are located in the Florentine State Archives, though none is signed by her.

One sonnet attributed to Vittoria was definitely not her creation, since we can assume she would not have referred to herself as dead:

I am the great Victoria who plucks the prize
of beauty from the Greeks and Latins.

And dead, I, too, bring wars and ruin,

And turn Rome upside down with my rank.

In the proud and glorious city,

Mother of heroes, high queen of the world,

I was born endowed with divine beauty

And lived among so many, who never found fame.
¹

Another depicts her plight shortly before her death in the Palazzo Foscari, waiting for doom to descend:

Reckless thought

Elevated to the sky, eager and light

Not to rejoice on high,

But to make me fall with a mortal leap.

You in my audacious flight

Promised me a tranquil peace.

Then, throwing me to the ground,

You fatefully gave me a perpetual war.

Oh, that others died

Because of my immoderate daring!

When I so often think

Of the good that’s past, I increase the present pain.

Thus if my thought

Was the only cause of my proud haste,

Cry much, my painful eyes

Until life seeps away in tears.
²

In late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, poison, murder, revenge, and adultery were thought to thrive under the warm Italian sun just as bacteria does in heat. Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet,
and other plays reflected and encouraged this trend. In 1612, Daniel Webster wrote a popular play about Vittoria called
The White Devil.
Webster had evidently heard from a traveler of the astonishing events twenty-seven years earlier, though the details were a bit hazy, allowing the playwright to embellish. In order to marry the Venetian courtesan, Vittoria, the slender dashing Paolo Giordano kills his first wife Isabella by smearing poison on the lips of his portrait which she devotedly kisses every night. Vittoria’s husband is killed the same night, his neck broken. The duke of Bracciano dies by putting on a poisoned helmet.

At least Webster got the finale right – a pile of freshly killed bodies heaped up on the stage as the curtain swings shut. Regarding Vittoria’s character, perhaps the only correct part was her courage in the moment before death:

I shall wellcome death

As princes doe some great embassadors.

Ile meet thy weapon halfe way…

I will not in my death shed one base tear

Or if I looke pale, for want of blood, not feare.
³

Public contempt for Lodovico’s murder of a defenseless woman is expressed in her next line:

‘Twas a manly blow!

The next thou giv’st, murder some sucking infant
and then thou wilt be famous.
⁴

Camilla, the mother-in-law Vittoria had scorned, lived to great old age beloved for her charity to the poor. Like the pope, Camilla never forgot where she came from. Refusing to waste her wealth on selfish extravagance, she gave to those who suffered hunger and poverty, as she had. She died in 1606 at about the age of eighty-seven.

Camilla’s grandchildren all had illustrious careers. On March 20, 1589, seventeen-year old Virginio Orsini, duke of Bracciano, married sixteen-year-old Flavia Peretti. The murderer’s son married the victim’s niece. The same day, her fourteen-year-old sister Felice married fourteen-year-old Marcantonio Colonna and became the duchess of Paliano. Out of his own money, Pope Sixtus gave each of the brides a dowry of 80,000 scudi cash, and 20,000 scudi in jewelry and furniture, “in order,” he said, “that they may buy a pair of shoes without asking their husbands’ permission.”
⁵

Out of Virginio and Flavia’s eleven children, five of them became friars – penance, perhaps, for their families’ sins. Flavia and Felice’s brother Michele became the prince of Venafro, and over time young Cardinal Alessandro Peretti would become a prelate of great distinction.

After the execution of Marcello, the Accorambonis lost the urge to get Paolo Giordano’s furniture. If they pushed for it, perhaps new charges would be made against the rapidly diminishing family, or some of them would eat a meal and suddenly keel over dead. Cardinal de Medici took possession of the furnishings as if the duke’s will had never existed and gave them to Virginio, along with Vittoria’s items in Rome’s Tor de Specchi convent.

A century after Vittoria’s murder, Accoramboni descendants thought back on her estate and tried to take the ruling duke of Bracciano, Flavio Orsini, to court. In 1691, they lost the case, as the court found a will could not be contested more than a century after the testator’s death. The court also found grave doubts about the legitimacy of Vittoria’s marriage to Paolo Giordano. Perhaps she had never been duchess at all.

The spendthrift Orsini gene kept getting passed down until the family spent itself into near oblivion. In 1696, the last Orsini duke sold the duchy of Bracciano to the family of Pope Innocent XI (reigned 1676-1689), the Odescalchis, who still own it today. The castle became a part of recent pop culture when in 2006 Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes in the main reception room.

In October 1587, Grand Duke Francesco of Tuscany and his courtesan-wife Bianca Cappello died within hours of each other from either malaria or poison. Many fingers pointed at Cardinal de Medici, who hated his brother’s second wife and wanted to prevent her from inheriting anything. Perhaps he was afraid of another protracted fight over furniture. Ferdinando gave his brother due funerary honors, but he tossed Bianca into an unmarked grave, just as Vittoria had been. Like Anne Boleyn before them, such was the fate of ambitious women who used beauty and sex to overstep their bounds.

Suddenly the new grand duke of Tuscany was a cardinal. Like most royal younger brothers who joined the Church, Ferdinando had only taken minor orders and had never been ordained a priest, which was thought to tattoo the soul forever with a sign that the individual couldn’t marry. Sixtus was forced to allow the cardinal he disliked to doff his red robes and become the ruler of neighboring Tuscany, where he was in a better position to squabble with the pope. Ferdinando married Christine of Lorraine and had nine children.

Some of the places associated with Vittoria’s life still exist, though sadly, the grandest of all does not. In 1784, Villa Montalto was bought by a tasteless merchant who sold most of the statues and knocked down the splendid two-hundred-year-old trees that Sixtus had planted before he became pope. The palace itself was razed in the 1860s to build Rome’s main train station, Termini. Those passengers arriving in Rome should remember, as they alight, that here a cardinal once tended his vines and plotted his vengeance.

The building where Vittoria was murdered miraculously survived the Allied bombs of March 1944, which were dropped across the street, and the gentler but equally devastating hand of time itself. Known as the Cavalli Palace after the family who bought it in the seventeenth century, today it is part of the geology department of the University of Padua. The glorious rooms are used, oddly enough, as offices, or filled with dark and dusty bookshelves, functions incongruous with its illustrious architecture.

It is not possible to say exactly where in the house Vittoria was murdered, though we have a good idea. According to contemporary reports, her altar was a small room off her bedroom. There are two rooms off the ballroom – currently used as offices – which would have been the right size for a bedroom. At the back of one of them is a door to a small chamber, which today houses not an altar and crucifix, but a lavatory. Perhaps this is the spot of Vittoria’s death, somewhere between the sink and the toilet.

The Salò palace where Paolo Giordano heaved his last breath is little changed since that day and remains in private hands. Mysterious and lovely, it slumbers at the very edge of Lake Garda, its ancient dreams undisturbed by the living. The current owner wonders if Vittoria hid her best jewels somewhere on the property – the ones Lodovico couldn’t find in her jewel box – and Paolo Giordano’s remaining gold. Perhaps she planned to retrieve them once Lodovico had finally sailed east. Maybe even now they lie forgotten in a palace wall, under a floor, or buried in the garden.

It is not known exactly where Vittoria and Flaminio lay. They had been placed, according to a contemporary report, “in the ground” at the Church of the Eremetani. There had been no marker, since nobody was around to pay for one. The bombs which spared the Foscari Palace blasted the German headquarters next to the church, which was largely destroyed, including numerous tombs and church records.

The exact location of Paolo Giordano’s body likewise remains a mystery. Like most Renaissance corpses, his was dragged across the street to the nearest church. There is no tombstone in or around the church bearing his name, though his will requested that one be made. It is likely that as soon as Vittoria arrived in Padua, she was concerned with matters other than her dead husband’s tombstone, fighting as she was with Lodovico over the furniture. But tombstone or no, where is his body?

According to the nobleman who currently owns the Salò palace, after Vittoria’s death Sixtus sent word to the Capuchin monks that a serial killer could not be entombed on sanctified soil. The frightened monks, knowing of the pope’s violent reputation when his edicts were not followed, immediately disinterred Paolo Giordano and laid his coffin on the ground outside the church. After a period of time, not knowing what to do with the coffin, the monks opened it up and tossed the duke into the lake which, it is said, never gives up its dead. Whatever was left of the duke’s bloated magnificence became a feast for fish. Perhaps that ending is the most fitting of all.

Sixtus had always planned for the future, and as pope he was thinking ahead to Judgment Day. When the trumpet was sounded, he wanted to crawl out of his grave, brush the dust from his clothing, and greet loved ones with gladness. He certainly didn’t want to be buried in Saint Peter’s Basilica and wake up to find himself in the company of dozens of other popes, many of whom he despised, such as the weak Gregory XIII and the horrible sex-crazed Borgia, Alexander VI.

The one pope he wanted to embrace on Judgment Day was his saintly friend and mentor, Pius V. In the summer of 1586, Sixtus built a tomb for Pius in a large side chapel in Saint Mary Major. He erected a beautiful statue of the pope, standing and giving a benediction. The figure wore the papal tiara with rays of the sun extending behind it. The plaque below it states that Sixtus constructed the tomb in gratitude. When the tomb was finished, on January 8, 1588, the pope had Pius’s body moved from Saint Peter’s. In the same chapel, Sixtus had his own tomb built, but his statue is far more humble. He is kneeling, his hands in prayer, and his papal tiara is placed on the floor behind him.

That same year, Sixtus moved the bodies of Francesco and Maria to the chapel, too, in separate mournful ceremonies attended by numerous cardinals. Francesco’s coffin, covered in a rich cloth, was placed on an open carriage and carried through the streets of Rome in a slow procession attended by eighteen cardinals wearing fuchsia mourning vestments. Monks carrying torches surrounded the funeral carriage.

In the crypt below Sixtus’s chapel were deposited the remains of the young man who had never attracted public attention except by his tragic end. He now attracted it a second time by the splendor of his belated funeral, held seven years after his murder. But once the slab was dragged into place, Francesco was once again forgotten by all but his mother and uncle. The day of the re-interment, Pope Sixtus V shed many tears over Francesco’s coffin and gave orders that when the time came his own should be placed beside it.

And there, until this very day, rest the young man who had enjoyed the amazing good fortune to marry the most beautiful girl in Rome, and the uncle who avenged him.

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Difesa di Francesco Filelfo,
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Lettera di Lodovico Orsino alla moglie,
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Lodovico Orsino,
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Morte della Corambona e dell’Orsino,
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, Vol. 1204