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  TO MY MOTHER, CHERI KAMEN TARGOFF

  INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF VITTORIA COLONNA

  HIGH IN THE HILLS thirty miles to the east of Rome is the ancient town of Subiaco. Named for the artificial lakes that the emperor Nero created from the upper course of the Aniene River in order to build himself a sumptuous villa—the town’s Latin name, Sublaqueum, literally means “under the lakes”—Subiaco was where Saint Benedict spent three years as a hermit in a cave before founding his first monastic community on the site in the early sixth century. Looking as if it had been carved directly into the cliffs, the monastery of San Benedetto lies at the top of a very long, treacherously narrow drive lined with beautiful woods. There are sweeping views of a verdant valley and gentle mountains in the distance.

  Just down the hill from the Benedictine monastery on the same winding road is a second monastery, dedicated to Benedict’s sister, Saint Scholastica. This was one of the twelve monasteries that Benedict founded in the area before leaving for the town of Cassino to the south. Here he finalized the Benedictine Rule, which laid out the exemplary asceticism that became the standard for the Western monastic tradition. Although less dramatic in its setting, the abbey of Saint Scholastica boasts three magnificent cloisters, the oldest of which dates back to the twelfth century. The monastery was renowned in the Middle Ages for its library, which had a famous scriptorium—a separate room where monks copied manuscripts—and it held ten thousand volumes by the year 1300. It was in the library of Saint Scholastica that Italy entered the world of print: in 1464, two German clerics, Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheym, crossed the Alps to set up a printing press in Subiaco, where they began to produce books using a technology that soon made the scriptorium obsolete.

  It was also in this celebrated library—now located in a different part of the monastery—that I found myself on a sweltering summer day several years ago, facing a Benedictine monk who was handing me a file of precious letters and documents from the early 1500s. I had come to consult the archive of the Colonna family, which has been housed in Subiaco since 1996, when it was moved from Rome. The Colonna archive has almost a hundred thousand items dating from as early as the twelfth century, and the great majority of the holdings are personal letters. From the late Middle Ages through the early twentieth century, the Colonna ruled over much of the territory to the southeast of Rome in the area known as the Castelli Romani, dotted with the castles of the great Roman families. Within Rome, the family owned—and still owns today—a grand palace in the very heart of the city; its magnificent art gallery and selected apartments are open to the public on Saturday mornings.

  My interest was in the poetry of one member of the family, Vittoria Colonna, who lived from 1490 to 1547. Among her many accomplishments, Vittoria was the very first woman in all of Italy to have a book of her poems appear in print. I had discovered her work while writing a book on Renaissance love poetry, and had been struck by the hundred or so sonnets that she addressed to her husband after his death. Given their emotional power and complexity, I was surprised to learn that she had subsequently abandoned love poetry altogether, and chosen to write only spiritual verse. In the sixteenth-century Italian books of her poetry that I had read at Harvard’s Houghton Library—there are no complete translations of her poems available in English, and the only Italian edition, published in 1982, is out of print—I noticed that in the illustration on the title page of one edition she looked very much like a nun. I also noticed she was consistently called “divine.” All of this intrigued me, and when I was in Rome some months later and learned that many of Vittoria’s original letters were in a nearby archive, I decided to make the trip.

  Title page of 1540 edition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime (Venice: Zoppino) (© The British Library Board, May 9, 2017, General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 11426.aa.18)

  There is no published or digital catalog of the Colonna archive, so I did not know exactly what I was looking for. But there was a rather primitive database on the library’s computer, and I was able to do a search for Vittoria. Two different call numbers came up, which I jotted down on a slip of scrap paper. The monk who had showed me into the room promptly copied the two numbers onto the palm of his hand—I offered to give him my piece of paper, but he said he preferred his method—and he disappeared into the archive. Some fifteen minutes later, he returned with two files—one a very thick set of documents, the other a single, large manuscript—which he placed on the table in front of me.

  What I found in those files gave me my first glimpse of the extraordinary life Vittoria had led. I read her scribbled notes to her brother Ascanio about his fight with Pope Paul III over taxes on salt, and to her nephew Fabrizio about Ascanio’s difficulties with the princess of Sulmona. I pored over her letter to the padre generale of the Capuchin monks urging him to treat the friars well and not serve them a low-quality bread, given how little they ate, and her response to the constables of the Colonna fief of Monte San Giovanni instructing them not to comply with the new system of taxation that the papal commissioner was trying to introduce. I found three pages from her personal account book, listing payments made and monies received for 1543 and 1544. I studied the inventory that her executor drew up the day after her death in 1547, listing the items left behind in her rooms at the nunnery in Rome where she had been living—I was particularly struck by the poignant mention of a single gold spoon. I read an irate letter from the same executor to her brother announcing his horror about the disposition of her wealth.

  After I went through the quite substantial stack of letters—carefully taking photographs, with the monk’s permission, so that I could study them con calma, as the Italians say, later on—I closed up the file and turned to the bound manuscript. Inside this rather grandiose volume filled with miscellaneous legal materials related to the Colonna family was the most elegant document I had seen so far: the wedding contract between Vittoria and her husband, Ferdinando Francesco I d’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara. (A marquis, or marchese, was the ruler of lands on the marche, the outskirts of territory controlled by the issuing authority, in this case the kingdom of Naples.) The contract was drawn up in Naples on June 13, 1507, when Vittoria and Ferrante (as Ferdinando was known) were both around seventeen years old. Written in a very beautiful hand, it was nearly twenty pages long, and specified, alternately in Latin and Italian, the terms of the dowry. There were many more details than I could possibly take in, and my Latin was very rusty, but I understood that the enormous sum of fourteen thousand ducats—twelve thousand in cash, and the remaining two thousand in portable property—was to be transferred to Ferrante from Vittoria’s father, the great military captain Fabrizio Colonna, whom I knew only as the principal speaker in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War.

  A page from the marriage contract between Vittoria Colonna and Ferrante d’Avalos, signed June 13, 1507 (Reproduced cour
tesy of Archivio Colonna, Biblioteca del Monastero di Santa Scolastica, Subiaco, Italy)

  Toward the end of the wedding contract I found a long list of the witnesses who were present at the signing. There were two princes, three dukes, two counts, one military captain, one bishop, and a number of ordinary citizens; all of them were men. The only woman who seemed to have been included was Ferrante’s guardian, Costanza d’Avalos, Duchess of Francavilla, who had raised him since early childhood following the death of his parents. Costanza was one of the three signatories to the contract, along with Ferrante and Fabrizio. From my preliminary glance at the document, Vittoria played no part at all.

  I left the archive in Subiaco that day with the desire to know much more about what I had seen—about the marriage between Vittoria and Ferrante, about her relations with her family, about her interactions with the world. I started to seek answers by reading what I could about Vittoria’s life. This proved oddly frustrating. For such a celebrated woman—according to the great nineteenth-century historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, she was “the most famous woman of Italy”—there was startlingly little written about her. The only respectable biography was by a German diplomat and historian named Alfred von Reumont and dated to 1881, before even an incomplete edition of Vittoria’s letters had been published (this volume appeared in 1892, and has not been updated). Reumont’s book, which I read in its Italian translation (it has never been translated into English), gave me the basic outline of Vittoria’s life, but said very little about her personal thoughts or experience. The handful of other biographies, mostly written in the early decades of the twentieth century and using Reumont as their key source, added very little. I decided to tell her story myself.

  The first thing I did was to map out the places Vittoria had lived and to try to visit them all. This proved more demanding than I could possibly have imagined, because she was unusually mobile for a woman of her period and class. Vittoria was born in the town of Marino, one of the Colonna’s feudal holdings outside of Rome, where she lived in a heavily fortified castle. When her father became Grand Constable of the Spanish-run kingdom of Naples, the family moved to Naples, where they had a beautiful palace in the heart of the city. Upon marrying, she and her husband took up residence on the island of Ischia in the castle that belonged to his family, and also maintained a palace of their own in Naples. After Vittoria became a widow at the age of thirty-five, she lived for a short time in Rome, then moved back to Marino, and ultimately returned to Ischia, where she stayed for the better part of six years. After this time, she led a very itinerant existence. Vittoria always came and went from Rome but spent long stretches of time in the cities of Ferrara, Orvieto, and Viterbo. In each of these places, she lived as a lay guest in a convent.

  Over the course of a few years, which included a sabbatical in Rome, I traveled to every single place that Vittoria had lived. In Ischia, I was able to stay in the castle that belonged to Ferrante’s family, which is now a beautiful hotel. In Viterbo, I spent a few days in a convent very similar to the one she lived in, and I tried out the monastic life for myself (it was not for me). I walked through the neighborhood in Naples where she and Ferrante had their home—one of the commercial streets nearby is still called Via Vittoria Colonna—and I saw Ferrante’s coffin draped in red velvet in the church of San Domenico Maggiore. I made multiple trips to Marino and the other Colonna properties in the Castelli Romani, and I developed a strong feeling for the isolated, dramatic landscapes that had shaped Vittoria’s childhood. These were towns often built high up on rocks or cliffs, strategically positioned in relation to the valleys below. Vittoria never lived in the beautiful Tuscan cities that most of us imagine when we think about the Renaissance—there was nothing remotely comparable to Siena or Florence—nor did she live in elegant courts like Urbino or Mantua. Hers was a rough-and-tumble Italy, filled with feudal lords, mercenaries, and peasants.

  Between trips to these often rather remote locations—there is no train service to almost any of Vittoria’s homes—I worked in the various archives that held her papers. I spent time in the manuscript room of the Vatican Library with the poems she gave to Michelangelo, and in the Laurentian Library in Florence, wearing thick gloves, with a manuscript copy of the poems given by Vittoria’s secretary to Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre. I returned on multiple occasions to Subiaco. Most of my time was spent studying the several hundred letters—both in manuscripts and in the printed Italian volume from the late nineteenth century—that have survived of her correspondence. Very few of these letters had ever been translated into English, and a certain number of them had never been transcribed from their original handwritten form.

  After all of my traveling around Italy, deciphering Vittoria’s manuscripts and translating her letters and poems, a portrait of a fascinating person emerged. Here was a woman graced with all of the privileges the Renaissance had to offer. She came from one of the most powerful families in all of Italy, was extremely well educated, and had many castles. She had made an important marriage with the heir to one of the ruling Spanish families in the kingdom of Naples. She was a very talented poet and wrote beautiful sonnets that brought her great fame. She lived an immensely glamorous life as a young woman, regularly attending parties with royalty from all of Europe. She commissioned paintings from Michelangelo and Titian, and was on a first-name basis with the Holy Roman Emperor.

  At the same time, Vittoria was a solitary person, who in her heart eschewed money and fame. She was profoundly religious and, once widowed, wanted to spend as much time as she could living alongside nuns. She was also adventurous in her faith and, despite her strong Catholic roots, became a firm believer in some of the core tenets of Protestantism. She resisted remarriage but developed very deep attachments, sometimes bordering on obsessions, with a number of charismatic men. She loved her family, and was loyal to her brother through his many political struggles at the same time that she avoided living with him or her other relatives whenever possible. She starved and beat herself as part of her religious penance, but also believed in her own election as one of God’s chosen few. No sooner did I think I had her pegged than she slipped from my grasp.

  There are still holes in Vittoria’s archive—letters that have not been found, events that cannot be verified, conversations that left no traces. But enough has remained to conjure her up. As we begin to understand not only her extraordinary accomplishments as a poet and writer, but also her complexity as a person, we see in a new light what made the historical moment in which she lived so remarkable. For Vittoria embodied in a single person—in a single woman—many of the qualities that make this period so different from any other; she captured its simultaneous magic and strangeness. In our learning about Vittoria Colonna, the Renaissance comes to life anew.

  1

  THE VIEW FROM THE CLIFF

  IN NOVEMBER 1525, a messenger from Milan bearing important news crossed the Bay of Naples. He was heading for a castle on the island of Ischia occupied by members of the d’Avalos family, one of the leading households in the kingdom of Naples, which was ruled at the time by the Spanish kings of Aragon. Ferdinand II, whose reign lasted only a year, before his death in 1496, had given the castle to Iñigo II d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, in gratitude for his distinguished military service in the wars that Naples waged against the French. Following Iñigo’s death in 1503, his sister Costanza d’Avalos had become governor of the island. It was unusual for a woman to be in such an official position of power—she was even responsible for several important naval victories fought off of the island’s coast—but Costanza was an unusual woman.

  As the boat approached Ischia, the messenger would have glimpsed his destination, which still produces awe in visitors today. Perched roughly three hundred feet above the sea on a volcanic rock, the castle seemed completely inaccessible to the world below. The extremity of the location was what had made it so desirable: having a castle high on a rock in the middle of the sea so
close to Naples was a significant military advantage, and since the fifth century B.C.E., when the first fortress was built on the site, it had been occupied in turn by Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Normans, and Swabians before becoming the property of the Spanish kings in the fifteenth century. The rock itself was rough and scorched, which, according to ancient legend, was a result of Zeus’s punishment of the giant monster Typhon, who had threatened the gods by hurling rocks at the sky and breathing out fire. Zeus was said to have crushed Typhon by covering him with nothing less than Ischia itself, but the fires raging from the giant continued to burn and left the island sterile.

  Etching of the Castello d’Ischia, by William Leighton Leitch (Image courtesy of Libreria Imagaenaria, Ischia)

  One does not need to know this myth to see that there was nothing cozy or welcoming about the castle as glimpsed from the sea below. Not only was it treacherously high above the water, but it also sat on its own islet with no obvious connection to the main island, so that the only visible access to the fortress was a terrifying set of broken stairs carved into the side of the cliffs. Scaling a volcanic rock was not normally part of a messenger’s mission, but judging from the haste with which he had been dispatched in Milan, the news he was bringing was clearly urgent. What our messenger would not initially have seen was the stone bridge on the western side of the castle that the first Spanish rulers had built in the mid-fifteenth century to connect the islet to the island; he also would not have seen the massive tunnel they had dug out from the rock that leads to the castle gates. The tunnel was both a comfortable means of entry for welcome guests and a form of defense against those who were not: carved into the ceiling along the way were large openings resembling skylights that were designed to allow boiling tar to be poured over intruders’ heads.