Travelogue 1220 – 19 November
Weak Cognac

The sack of Rome in 1527 stands in history as unique and tragic in its scale. It left tens of thousands dead, maimed, or in flight. Churches were desecrated, historic treasures were plundered, monuments and ancient buildings were damaged or destroyed. The impact on society, church and history were deep and irreversible. The era of the great nation states was dawning, and this event only confirmed the inexorable fate of city-states, like the misstep of a giant that crushed a cherished old temple.

But it would be a mistake to see the event as an anomaly, as something that stands alone in kind (vs degree). It would be a mistake to see the Romans or the Italians in general, as only victims. In this regard, it is easy for sympathetic readers to forget that the Vatican was sacked only one year earlier, and it wasn’t by the Germans. It was by Romans.

The Orsini and the Colonna were rival Roman lines of nobility that had connived against each other and fought for centuries. The history of the Orsini reached even further than that of the Colonna. There were Orsini popes as early as the eighth century. And by the late Middle Ages, the two families had settled into the division found in many Italian communities, known as Guelph and Ghibelline. The Orsini supported the papacy and the Colonna the Holy Roman Emperors. In the sixteenth century, this became bitingly relevant, as Emperor Charles V inserted himself into the Italian conflicts.

The pressures building on the Medici pope, Clement VII, elected in 1523, were enormous. The French and Spanish began lobbying him relentlessly for support: alliance, money, and troops. The Spanish were juggernauts, and King Francis I – the French king captured by the armies of Vittoria’s husband in 1525 – managed to cobble together a fragile alliance against them in 1526, the League of Cognac. Clement VII joined this group, with Venice, Florence, and Milan. It might have been a good concept, but, with a typical flourish of self-interest, Florence took this occasion to attack Sienna. They failed to take it, and their loss rose like a signal over the land that it was open season on the papacy.

Travelogue 1219 – 15 November
La Doglia

I heard recently that widows are happier after the death of their mate than before, just speaking statistically. Vittoria Colonna never remarried, despite the hopes of all the scheming noble families. She made her position in life and society very clear. She spent nearly a year among the nuns of San Silvestro in Capite after the death of Fernando. And she began to write, and she wrote copiously, about her dear departed husband in sonnet after sonnet. Fernando appeared over and over as her "bel sole", her sun, her "lume eterno", her everlasting light.

“Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia,” she wrote in one famous sonnet. I write to vent the internal pain.

It's hard to say whether her pain was real or performative. The case is strong for the latter – it lasted an awfully long time, and generated quite a few poems, poems that were shared far and wide, - but generally, I think that “both-things-are-true” arguments get short shrift in modern thinking. We would rather not admit that human psychology is hypocritical by nature, or to put it more gently, that we condemn complex emotion by calling it hypocritical.

After living nearly a year among the nuns in Rome, Vittoria was forced to leave. Her brother Ascanio fetched to take her to safety in their palace outside Rome, in Marino. The Colonna family was quarrelling with the Medici Pope, and their properties and lives were in peril again. Disgusted by Roman politics, she returned to Ischia early in 1527.

“Oh! Che tranquillo mar, oh che chiare onde …”, she wrote upon her return to Ischia. What a tranquil sea, what clear waves! Fortune had smiled on her this once. Only a few months later, Rome was entered by imperial troops, mostly German, and subjected to atrocities that printed themselves on the history of Europe indelibly, locked in the code of violence and hatred that would guide the Reformation for a century and a half. In a year, Rome’s population was reduced by some 80%. Only a wave of plague drove the pillaging army away in February 1528.

Travelogue 1218 – 11 November
Troubles

The gaiety of youth passes. Life has changes in store. It is hard to estimate, when one is young, how much change a decade can effect. One full decade has not passed, even yet, since Trump was elected for the first time. It was 2016, and we had an idea that history was a huge ship that was nearly imperturbable. No storm could rock it. Momentum would carry it on. Changing course on the high seas would require more effort than a small group of zealots had the stamina for. We could afford to wait out one errant administration, this one storm.

In 1516, one of Vittoria’s brothers died. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the church in Wittenberg. In context, these were tragedies on a scale that seemed manageable. But these were first links in a chain. Challenges of a different order were awaiting in the next decade, as Vittoria entered her thirties.

In 1520 and 1522, she lost her parents. In 1522, Fernando took on the Emperor’s commission, and it was the last time she saw him. In 1525, after the battle with the French, in which the French king was captured, Fernando was something of a hero. The forces looking to unite Italians against the emperor momentarily saw in him an opportunity. They approached him to change allegiance. Vittoria, when she caught wind of the conspiracy, urged her husband in letters to be loyal. Ultimately, he did, capturing the messenger of the conspirators, torturing him and prosecuting him.

I have read that Vittoria fell ill that summer. The cause is not known, but she was bedridden. Maladies drifted back then, lifted by breezes, touching down here and then, nameless and dry, robbing people of vitality. It appears in biographies without cause. No one is quite sure what took Fernando away at the moment it did, almost a year after the battle that left wounds on him. They say Vittoria battled illness the rest of her life.

It was December when Fernando died. She was on her way to his bedside; she had made it as far as Viterbo, just north of Rome. There she received news of his passing. She returned to Rome, and she retreated into the convent of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. She entered only days after Fernando passed, and she stayed until the autumn of the next year. Friends high in the church appealed to the Pope to forbid the nuns of the convent to allow Vittoria to join them by taking orders. This gives us an idea how esteemed she was, both as a dazzling member of the nobility and of the litterati, but also as a marriageable commodity.

Travelogue 1217 – 4 November

Sposata 

 

Vittoria and Fernando were married in 1509, when she was 17, and they lived together in Ischia together for two years before Fernando went off to war. In 1512, he joined the Spanish armies in the north of Italy, and almost immediately he was captured by the French, which provides the first of a neat set of bookends in his career. He wasn’t detained in Milan long by the French, thanks in large part to connections with the Colonna family, and he was kept comfortably.

Imprisoned by the French in Milan, Fernando wrote a ‘Dialogo d’Amore’ to his wife. It hasn’t survived. Vittoria responded with 112 lines in terza rima, which did survive, the oldest sample of her poetry that we have. She wrote:

 

“Se Vittoria volevi, io t’era appresso;

Ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei.”

 

If you wanted Victory, I was right next to you. But, in leaving me, you left her. Her letter was a piece too pretty, full of classical allegory and puns, as was the custom.

 

Fernando was returned to the family, but he stayed only briefly. He was off to war again the next year, and he fought for the Spanish with honour, almost without respite, for nine years.

 

Life carried on at Ischia. Vittoria and her aunt, Costanza, gathered their literary luminaries, writers with names like Musefilo, Filocalo, Giovio, Minturno, Cariteo, Rota, Sanazzaro, and Tasso, and the island enjoyed something of a reputation for culture. “Superbo scoglio,” Bernardo Tasso wrote in a later sonnet about Ischia, “altero e bel ricetto / Di tanti chiari eroi, d’imperadori!” Proud rock, high and beautiful retreat, for such heroes, such conquerors!

 

Naples was the nearest major court, where the aggressive Spanish kingdom was based. Here, the d’Avalos family from Ischia could consort with the nobility of the realm. According to contemporary accounts, Vittoria and her aunt were dazzling.

 

The year was spent in celebrations and ceremony, pageants, parties, and religious observations. Gaiety and extravagance were the order of the day, gold and silk, sumptuous dress and sumptuous food. I just read about a wedding banquet in Naples that ran to 27 courses and only finished at five in the morning.