Word: mandragola
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...Mandragola, set in Italy at the close of the quattrocento, uses the stones of Florence to soften up a girl's resistance. As an impregnably virtuous Renaissance lady enduring a crash course in fertility, Rosanna Schiaffino is stretched out in bed with large, warm rocks on her stomach, then is marinated in giant tubfuls of broth, and finally is sealed, screeching, into a body-length hot-water bag to test another old wives' tale. More than 400 years after it was penned by the cynical Renaissance moralist, Niccolo Machiavelli, this ribald comedy classic still looks exuberantly...
...heated young gallant (Philippe Leroy) who merely wants to get her to bed and does. The lover presses his suit with life-or-death urgency, disguising himself as the luckless lout who is supposed to perish by black magic after Lucrezia has downed a potion brewed of mandragola, or mandrake root, and spent the night with him. Once conquered, Lucrezia cherishes the lad's do-or-die passion, ultimately scores her own sexual coup over the hypocrisy shown in the affair by her cuckolded husband, her amoral mother and a venal priest...
...contrary, said De Boccard's lawyer, the writer admired Gina's beauty, and had intended admiration all the while. As for the offensive word, it was really an old Italian term used by such a famed writer as Machiavelli (in his bawdy 1524 comedy, Mandragola...
...that he may some day write a book about a man like Borgia. "My dear Niccoló," says a friend, "you're so impractical. Who d'you think would read it? You're not going to achieve immortality by writing a book like that." The play, Mandragola, was finished about 1514. The Prince came out some nine years later...
...Though he filled much of his time with wine, women, and oaths, he was forced out of sheer boredom to pore long hours over his beloved Latin-history, comedy, philosophy (translated from the Greek)-and set down his own political philosophy (The Prince, The Discourses), his own broad humor (Mandragola...