Word: lucrezia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCREZIA BORGIA, by Maria Bellonci, made the famous daughter of profligate Pope Alexander VI a more human and attractive woman than the poisoner of legend, but still conveyed the horrors that went on around her and finally drove her to a hair shirt and piety...
Taffeta & Hair Shirts. Lucrezia never poisoned anybody - at least so far as Author Bellonci knows. The other crimes laid at her door were all the work of her brother Cesare or, in some cases, of Pope Alexander. At Ferrara, where she spent the last 17 years of her life, she won the affections of the court and the townspeople by her pleasantness in good times, and her bravery in bad. But even there, she did not escape trouble. She soon found herself in the middle of a family squabble, when one of her husband's brothers had gouged...
Toward the end of her life, after her father and brother had died, Lucrezia turned to religion. She wore a hair shirt underneath her taffeta, and in 1518 joined an order of the laity, the Third Order of St. Francis...
...next year, after the birth of her ninth child, she came down ill. Lucrezia felt old and very weary. "The poor woman," said her courtiers, "is having great difficulty in departing." The next day, at 39, she died...
...Victor Hugo fattened the legend in his play, Lucrezia Borgia, in which Lucrezia poisons a roomful of banqueters only to discover that her lovechild, Gennaro, is among them. Unappreciatively, Gennaro stabs her, to the accompaniment of Latin plain chant, as monks arrive with coffins for all. This imaginary incident made such a good spectacle that Donizetti wrote an opera around it. *The Florentine Ambassador Machiavelli met Cesare in the course of diplomatic business, was so taken with Cesare's forthright approach that he used him as an exemplar of the successful ruler in the famed treatise, The Prince...