Word: orsini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...medieval Rome, when swords were drawn in factional street fighting, the battle cries of the two most powerful families were "Orsini for the church!" and "Colonna for the people!" For more than a millennium the princely Orsinis have stood firmly beside the Vatican; tradition credits them with five Popes, 18 saints, 40 cardinals. Eleven Orsini women became queens; Orsini men married twelve daughters of kings and emperors. In 1725 Pope Benedict XIII sought to end the continuous feuding between Orsini and Colonna by ordering that the leader of each house should alternate as his Prince Assistant at Mass and other...
...current Prince Orsini is 37-year-old Filippo Napoleone, who replenished the declining fortunes of his house by marrying Franca Bonacossi, a provincial sugar-beet heiress from Padua. Franca, a woman of ambitious piety, filled her home with cardinals, bishops, monsignors and assorted clergy, urged that her husband be appointed Prince Assistant to the Pope in place of his father (who had been disqualified when he married a U.S. divorcee). She succeeded. But stocky, handsome Filippo Napoleone was bored by cardinals as dinner guests. He preferred to drink cocktails and talk to pretty girls in nightclubs. He never went home...
...floor, was rushed to a Rome hospital and stomach-pumped of an excess of barbiturates. Filippo rushed after her and created such a scene that attendants had to remove him bodily. When his wife and her lawyer appeared next morning at the flat he had shared with Belinda, Prince Orsini tamely let himself be led home, but then-in a burst of anger-slashed his wrists with a razor blade...
Belinda recovered. So did Orsini. Princess Orsini stated, "I stand by my husband," and bundled him off to a hilltop castle called La Catena (The Chain...
...until standards of literary decency are chucked entirely. His fancy is that Mona Lisa is written by French Poet Francois Villon; it turns out to be a between-the-sheets foray into the political brawls and sexual excesses of Renaissance Italy. It begins with the hero. Giovantonio Del Balzo-Orsini, lying under his mother's bed as she submits to her wifely duties, and it maintains that level of fictional and historical curiosity throughout. Prominent in the milling cast of characters is a queen of Naples whose appetite for men is inextinguishable. Pretending to be interested in Italian political...