Word: borgias
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...cities as Sofia and Bucharest and Belgrade have always seemed to be on the other side of the moon. But the Red Flag flies also over cities that hold the West's most poignant memories: Virgil's Mantua, Ambrose's Milan, Ferrara. the city of Lucrezia Borgia- a woman the Communists would have appreciated: learned and turbulent Bologna, Dante's soft symmetrical Florence; Dandolo's capitalist Venice. The Communists hold Leghorn, where Shelley spent some of his waning days, and Galileo's Pisa, and Parma, famous for violets and Toscanini...
...Horrors. Lucy FitzGerald chose to live in London, in a house whose front windows looked out on a zoo, the back windows on a cemetery. The dim living room was papered in dark green-a "chamber of horrors," groaned Poet FitzGerald, "[in which my wife looks] like Lucretia Borgia." FitzGerald found "a sort of consolation" in "some curious Infidel and Epicurean Tetrastichs by a Persian of the Eleventh Century-as Savage against Destiny ... as Manfred-but mostly of Epicurean Pathos of this kind -'Drink-for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden...
...16th Century had its bastards, and Borgia was one of them, with particularly illegitimate and realistic political ideas. Quite probably he picked up some from his father, Pope Alexander VI,* who was realistic enough to shock even Renaissance Italy. Borgia made a great impression on Europe while he lasted (he died at 31). He made a greater one still on Machiavelli, who spent a few months at his headquarters, as envoy from the Signory of Florence...
...wary, humorous, thoughtful lecher with stomach trouble, who spends most of his free time worrying about how (and if) he is going to keep an assignation with a lady named Aurelia. During business hours he proves to be an astute, hard-working Florentine spy. He admires Borgia's ruthless audacity, but always from a diplomatic distance...
...Borgia finally offers Machiavelli a job, at much better pay than he will ever earn in Florence. Machiavelli turns it down, partly out of loyalty to Florence, partly because he has seen what happens to Borgia's henchmen. When he returns home at the end of his mission, he realizes that he has had an education in statecraft and princely behavior, also in the behavior of women. He drafts a saucy play about a woman like Aurelia, hints that he may some day write a book about a man like Borgia. "My dear Niccoló," says a friend...