Word: borgias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...exactly the customary 30 minutes, had kind words for her husband's concern for Argentine underprivileged, his aid to war-torn countries of Europe, his contributions to papal charities. At interview's end, the Pope gave her a handsome rosary. Then Evita went on to visit the Borgia apartments (which are still haunted, Italians say, by the ghosts of libertine Pope Alexander VI and his daughter Lucrezia), and to pray at St. Peter's, where some 100 curious onlookers waiting under the front colonnade broke into applause...
...cities as Sofia and Bucharest and Belgrade have always seemed to be on the other side of the moon. But the Red Flag flies also over cities that hold the West's most poignant memories: Virgil's Mantua, Ambrose's Milan, Ferrara. the city of Lucrezia Borgia- a woman the Communists would have appreciated: learned and turbulent Bologna, Dante's soft symmetrical Florence; Dandolo's capitalist Venice. The Communists hold Leghorn, where Shelley spent some of his waning days, and Galileo's Pisa, and Parma, famous for violets and Toscanini...
...Horrors. Lucy FitzGerald chose to live in London, in a house whose front windows looked out on a zoo, the back windows on a cemetery. The dim living room was papered in dark green-a "chamber of horrors," groaned Poet FitzGerald, "[in which my wife looks] like Lucretia Borgia." FitzGerald found "a sort of consolation" in "some curious Infidel and Epicurean Tetrastichs by a Persian of the Eleventh Century-as Savage against Destiny ... as Manfred-but mostly of Epicurean Pathos of this kind -'Drink-for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden...
...wary, humorous, thoughtful lecher with stomach trouble, who spends most of his free time worrying about how (and if) he is going to keep an assignation with a lady named Aurelia. During business hours he proves to be an astute, hard-working Florentine spy. He admires Borgia's ruthless audacity, but always from a diplomatic distance...
...Borgia finally offers Machiavelli a job, at much better pay than he will ever earn in Florence. Machiavelli turns it down, partly out of loyalty to Florence, partly because he has seen what happens to Borgia's henchmen. When he returns home at the end of his mission, he realizes that he has had an education in statecraft and princely behavior, also in the behavior of women. He drafts a saucy play about a woman like Aurelia, hints that he may some day write a book about a man like Borgia. "My dear Niccoló," says a friend...