Borgia’s life was in upheaval when she first made the acquaintance of the poet Pietro Bembo in 1502. At age 22, she was already infamous. The illegitimate daughter of Rodrigo Borgia (better known as Pope Alexander VI), and sister to Cesare, she had arrived in the Northern Italian city of Ferarra for her third arranged marriage, in the relatively recent wake of the highly suspicious death of her young (second) husband - most likely at the hands of her scheming brother - and the birth and subsequent banishment of her first legitimate child.------------------------------------
It is somewhat unsurprising to find out that under these circumstances, she first took up a passionate dalliance with her husband's sister's husband - a dashing mercenary with a trucker’s ‘stache - and then a more complicated relationship with the older poet, who was employed at her new husband’s estate.
Bembo was ten years her senior and no one really knows the full extent of their relationship, but it is clear from the handwritten letters, spanning some 16 years, that the two shared an intimate and romantic bond long after Bembo left Ferarra for Urbino.
Lucretia Borgia, the Opera:
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Lucretia Borgia, the desert:
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Lucretia Borgia, businesswoman?
New research by an American historian, Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, may show that Lucrezia Borgia was falsely accused of the murder of her husband, and that she may have been more involved with business than with intrigue.
Ghirardo believes that an economic downturn may have forced the noblewoman to concern herself with revenues from farming, and it was here that she made her fortune. Ghirardo explains: "Lucrezia grasped the untapped potential of thousands of acres of marginal, waterlogged land, but she was too shrewd to employ her own resources to purchase it unless absolutely necessary."
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