Word: borgia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCREZIA BORGIA (343 pp.)-Mario Bellonc!-Harcourt, Brace...
...Lucrezia Borgia? To the incurable readers of melodrama and Sunday supplements, a woman of glowing and undimmed evil, literally the great femme fatale (usually poison) of the Italian Renaissance.* To modern historians, who have been quietly rehabilitating her, Lucrezia was a good deal less lurid but still deplorable: a woman who probably poisoned no soup herself but weakly watched the other Borgias doing such things...
Like Cesare himself, whose violent life came to a violent end at 32, the tomb was not long for this world. In 1527, a touring bishop of Calahorra. whose family had long been persecuted by Rome's ruthless Borgias, caught sight of it and howled at the outrage of such a sinner as Cesare being buried in church ground. The sarcophagus was demolished forthwith. The remains of Cesare Borgia, illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI and himself a cardinal at 18, an accomplished murderer at 25, and military conqueror of a good part of Italy at 27, were carried...
...workmen overhauling the town sewer solved part of the problem by inadvertently digging up Cesare. The disinterred Borgia bones were shrouded in a casket of silver and oak and placed in the town hall, while the ancient debate raged with new fury. Time passed; an old priest died, and a younger priest took' over; an old mayor died, and a younger mayor took his office; both agreed that it was time to end the ancient rift and to give Cesare a decent burial...
...last week as the villagers of Viana lined the streets, the casket bearing all that remained of Cesare Borgia was carried at last from the town hall and laid to rest once again in Santa Maria Church, with the full blessing of the see of Calahorra. In Viana it was felt that everyone would sleep better from...